🌲 Issue #47: Rooting A Meaningful Career
How CGU graduate Josh Hammack relentlessly pursued a meaningful career and his dream job
💬 Welcome to issue #47 of Between the Lines
This past month, roughly 2,000 new students tossed their caps in the air, graduated from one of the seven Claremont Colleges, and started the next step in their careers. A huge congrats and best of luck to all of them. 🎉
While graduation is an incredibly exciting milestone, it can also be a daunting one for many who are unsure of where to take the next step in their career and life. CGU alumnus Josh Hammack shares his raw experience of searching for a meaningful career even after a few different stints and tries.
~ Josh & Miles
📢 👥 Community Voices: Rooting A Meaningful Career
Author: Josh Hammack
Josh Hammack served in the United States Marines and was Honorably discharged at the rank of Sergeant / E5. He holds two Masters’ Degrees in US History and Gender Studies and is a Ph.D. Candidate in US History at Claremont Graduate School. He went from student to college adjunct teaching at community colleges around the LA County area. Later on, he transferred careers into his role as CEO and then Business Development Director at a digital marketing startup. Most recently he landed his newest position at Eden Reforestation Projects as the Director of Investments and Partnerships.
CGU was the place that helped mold me into the person I am today. When I received my welcome packet, I immediately identified with the Mission Statement in the brochure; “Claremont Graduate University prepares individuals to be leaders for positive change in the world.”
Over the course of my journey to get to Eden Reforestation Projects, I constantly doubted if I was making the right decisions for my career. I learned that doubting and questioning is a normal part, rather an encouraged part, of finding a happy balance between work and personal life.
If you are in a position where you feel trapped, there are smart ways to go about making a shift. Establish your big picture goal and then the smaller goals to get there — like a staircase, you can’t just jump to the top. Having small wins as part of the bigger picture will motivate you to stick to your plan and help build a foundation for positive change. Be patient (took me 18 years), work hard, and remember to never stop learning. Every position I’ve held prepared me for my next step regardless of the industry. Lastly, that dream job position you desire is out there, but it may change along your journey. If you would have asked me out of Graduate School what my dream job is, I would have said a tenured professorship at a 4-year university. This is very different than my opinion now.
Since CGU, my goal was always to be a positive change in the world. I can finally say now I’m closer than ever. Eden Reforestation is the real deal. We work with local communities around the world to restore forests on a massive scale, thereby creating jobs, protecting ecosystems, and helping mitigate climate change. In each of our project nations, we start by employing local communities and building relationships with local leaders who want their environment to thrive. These communities guide us to planting opportunities, build their citizens’ commitment to restoring and protecting the forest, and overcome obstacles with grit and determination. 👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Gordon Stitt
In 1974, Gordon Stitt was a physics major at HMC. After only two years in Claremont, Stitt left to get an early start to his career. At the beginning of his career, he worked in corporate marketing at Sun Microsystems and was director of marketing and sales at Ven-Tel. He then co-founded Network Peripherals in 1989 and served first as its VP of marketing, and then as vice president and general manager of the OEM business unit. At the time, Network Peripherals was the largest vendor of the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) technology while it was popular in the 1990s.
In 1996, Stitt then left and co-founded Extreme Networks and served as CEO until 2006, but then continued as chairman of the board of directors for another five years. Under his leadership, the company went public in 1999 and was nominated as the #1 fasted growing company in Silicon Valley. In 2001, Stitt was also a national finalist and award recipient of the EY Entrepreneur of The Year Award. Since his time at Extreme, Stitt has joined numerous company boards such as Skyfire, RGB Networks, and Barracuda Networks.
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
CMC alumnus Mollie Amkraut is the Co-Founder of Crew — an early-stage startup building a career design platform. Their platform provides tools, coaching, and peer connection to help people discover and stay connected to the things that truly matter in one’s career. If LinkedIn is your public-facing professional persona, think of Crew and their proprietary Career Canvas as your internal persona that keeps track of all your strengths and achievements. Instead of scrolling job postings and other people’s updates on LinkedIn, you come here to find clarity and confidence in your work. They are currently hiring and would love to welcome some more Claremont folks onto the team.
Peregrine Biosense is a biotech startup and lab founded in Austin by Pomona and Stanford alumnus Cooper Galvin. Peregrine aims to be the global standard in seconds-scale diagnostics, retooling current healthcare infrastructure and enabling communities to be free of communicable diseases. Their core sensing technology is based on tiny, inexpensive disposable (or refreshable) semiconductors functionalized with antibodies to detect common and novel pathogens. Currently, Cooper and the team are looking for a summer intern in embedded systems and sensors engineering.
Embedded Systems & Sensors Engineer (Summer Internship)
Dan Curtis is a Claremont alumnus and the Founder and CEO of VICES - a highly curated membership experience centered around a monthly delivery of exceptional goods. VICES is the ultimate luxury subscription box that delivers a curated selection of exceptional goods that promote those vices that bring out the best in us. Currently, Dan and the team are looking for creative sales executives to drive the development of their corporate custom giftbox division - VICES VIP. If you’re interested - shoot us a note.
Make sure to check out the other 5,000+ open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, make sure to create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 750+ remote jobs, 180+ internships, or 30+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research showing that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform, so pay attention Claremonsters!
As always, if any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or if you are an employer and are looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top read 🔥
Congrats to Tydo and CMC Co-Founders Manav Kohli and Scott Sonneborn on their recent product launch. Tydo launched out of YC and helps eCommerce brands optimize their business, and they just launched their new eCommerce analytics platform.
Everything else you need to know….📖
Deal or No Deal? Apparently, it’s a deal. Pomona alumnus Stephen Smith is the CEO and Co-Founder of NOCD — the #1 telehealth provider for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). They just partnered with Howie Mandel to help end the stigma around one of the top ten most disabling chronic conditions in the U.S. right now.
Cuy Sheffield, Pomona alumnus and VP/Head of Crypto at Visa, shares why he thinks Pomona and other liberal arts colleges are uniquely positioned to train future leaders in cryptocurrency - “Crypto is like liberal arts as a career.”
Arkose Labs empowers banks, fintechs, and other financial institutions to protect user accounts and eliminate large-scale fraud attacks. The company was founded by Claremont alumnus and serial founder, Matthew Ford, and Arkose was just awarded the Tech of the Future award for fraud detection and security.
Extreme Networks, co-founded by HMC alumnus Gordon Stitt, is a networking company that designs, develops, and manufactures wired and wireless network infrastructure equipment and the software for network management. They recently partnered with Verizon to install WiFi in Manchester United’s stadium.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
♻️ Decarbonizing The Consumer Landscape….. Planet FWD is a carbon-assessment startup developing technology so that the $1.5 trillion consumer products industry can more accurately measure and reduce its carbon footprint. The company just finished raising its Series A to continue creating a carbon-management technology platform for consumer brands to measure, reduce and neutralize emissions and report their carbon footprint. Kayalin Akens-Irby (CMC) is the CoS at Planet FWD.
🌎 The Changing Geography of VC….. Fernando Rivera, Pomona alumnus and Founder/Managing Partner of BuenTrip Ventures, shares with StartupCity how 30% of Latin America’s GDP receives only 5% of venture dollars which has created massive opportunities for investors willing to invest in non-traditional markets and non-elite founders. “For those more enterprising investors interested in LATAM, it would pay to look outside of the traditional hubs for amazing founders building amazing companies.”
🤖 Biggest Tech Deal Of All Time….. Broadcom, the global semiconductor leader, is acquiring VMware for $61 billion in one of the biggest tech acquisitions ever. VMware is a cloud infrastructure company that acquired HMC-founded Heptio (founded by HMC alumnus Joe Beda) not too long ago. This giant acquisition for VMware is designed to boost Broadcom’s software business. Fun fact: there are currently 18 different Claremont alumni working at VMware.
🩺 Doximity Reports $344M….. Founded in 2010, Doximity is the leading digital platform for medical professionals. The company’s network members include over 80% of U.S. physicians across all specialties and practice areas. CMC alumnus, Nate Gross, is the Co-Founder and CSO for Doximity, which just reported over $344M in revenue for fiscal 2022. The company also surpassed 2M registered members and recently closed its acquisition of Amion as they look to become the physician cloud in the U.S.
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