Community Spotlight: Trying Something New
June 7th, 2021
Who we’re featuring this week: Regan Gore
Position: Community Manager at January Ventures
After working post grad in executive search & consulting, you took a 1st grade teaching position at an all-boys school. Since April you have been working as a community manager at January Ventures. Can you describe the decision process and experience pivoting into each of these roles?
It's definitely been a whirlwind of a year! At the end of last summer, I had been reflecting on my job and realized it was likely time to think about new things, and somewhat out of the blue I had a chance to teach first grade when they needed more teachers to help with the new COVID restrictions in the classroom. I really just jumped in and figured it would be a good “gap year” to figure out what I wanted to do. I quickly fell in love with teaching and while every day is definitely an adventure, for better or worse, it’s been an incredible learning experience.
Toward the end of the winter, I attended an Aspire to Her panel about Venture Capital platform roles and realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do – it tied together everything I loved about community-building, operations, people, and innovation. One of the panelists recommended reading Femstreet and joining their community, where I ended up meeting a mentor (thank you Samantha Gelt!) who helped me find different platform job applications. Through her help, I was able to land a role at January Ventures as a part-time Community Manager, which I’ve been able to do while teaching. I also recently accepted a role at Eniac Ventures as a Platform & Operations Associate, which I will start when the school year ends.
If I’ve learned anything from this process, it’s the importance of connections and mentorship. My mentors from the Aspire to Her programs have been completely instrumental in helping me tell my story and gain confidence in my ability to pivot into completely new things. And my mentor through Femstreet helped me realize that VC platform roles were the right opportunities to explore. But really, I wouldn’t have had any chances without taking the initial leap to join Aspire to Her’s Grow Your Career Program.
What is your advice for someone debating whether to try something new or different as a next step in their career?
Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that each opportunity needs to connect to what you want to do in the future! A lot of people give advice that you should have some sort of career path, or that your different need to tie together in some way, but they absolutely do not need to be on a clear path and they will end up all creating a story together in the end. I truly cannot emphasize this enough. When I quit my job last summer to teach first grade, a lot of people told me this was a deviation from my career path that could end up harming my chances of getting another job in the “traditional” business world. This could not be further from the truth. Throughout the interview process for both of my jobs in VC, I had many people tell me what an asset my teaching experience was, and I was able to make so many connections between teaching and business. Honestly, a lot of teaching is operations, it’s talking to people and selling an idea (to a very complex audience), and it’s solving problems on your feet before anyone realizes anything is amiss. These are all very transferable skills, and I’m really glad that my interviewers were able to see that as well. And quite honestly, if I’ve been able to keep a group of eight-year-old boys engaged and listening, I feel like I can do a lot of things, or at least have the confidence to try.
So definitely be confident, take a leap, and go a bit off the beaten path when thinking about trying something new! What I thought was a “gap year” in my career has turned into the most influential experience, and I’ve learned so many new skills that I likely would not have developed if I had stayed where I was while I figured out my career goals.
That being said, definitely also continue to develop yourself in the process. Outside of work and teaching, I’m in a Masters program all about the social foundations of people. I realized early on that this would allow me to keep learning and growing, and it would ensure that I also didn’t have any career gaps while I figured out what I wanted to do. Programs like Aspire to Her’s Grow Your Career and Mentorship programs also have helped me to polish my story and figure out how to consciously think about my next steps. I think that continuing to learn about yourself and actively grow in your professional self is important when thinking about pivoting or trying something completely new.
