Hillel at Baruch College hosts weekly “Self-Made” events that offer members and other Baruch students the opportunity to learn about several topics such as financial literacy and self-development. 

This week’s “Self-Made” event focused on career decisions with guest speaker Avy Leghziel, director of education at the Israeli public-service organization Masa. 

The event focused on having students understand the skills and attributes they can bring to a future job, as well as teaching students how to understand the market in which they plan on working in. 

The event started with Leghziel showing students statements and asking them to share their opinions with the group. One statement read, “I would feel comfortable working for the same organization for the rest of my life.” 

Then, students were asked whether or not they agreed with the statement and to describe why or why not. This exercise, as Legziel explained, was designed to have students understand better what kind of careers they would prefer. 

Shoshanah Larios, a business communications and graphics major, frequently attends the “Self-Made” events because she sees it as “a great way to meet people with similar interests in business.” She added that she encouraged students to attend because the events are “entrepreneurial and informative.”

Leghziel continued to teach students about Ikigai, a Japanese concept meaning “a reason to wake up in the morning” or “a reason for being.” 

He shared with the group that people in Okinawa, a small town in Japan, attribute their above-average life expectancies to this philosophy. 

Ikigai has four major components: what one’s good at, what one loves or is passionate about, what the world — or market, as Leghziel adds — needs, and what can be paid for. 

Only when these four are working together can one achieve Ikigai, according to Leghziel. Although Leghziel believes achieving exactly all four is very unlikely and somewhat unrealistic, he does find it worth investigating and reflecting on. 

Lastly, he had the students reverse engineer their own careers in the form of a résumé set in 2033. The exercise was designed for students to discover what they’d like to achieve and to reflect on how to get there. 

Leghziel’s last takeaways from his presentation was to encourage students to first take time to understand who they are and what they have to offer, as well as to take time to understand the market they wish to enter. 

Marketing Director at Hillel and creator of Hillel’s “Self-Made” events Michael Stevens finds these events as a reflection of what he wished to have when he was a student at Baruch.

 As an alumus, Stevens created these events to become a good place to have informative group discussions. “As I always say at the beginning of each event, no one is the smartest person in the room. We can all learn something from one another.”

“I created these events to help students in Hillel and across campus to find their self-value and to serve as a facilitator for this conversation,” he continued. 

“A student who usually comes to these events told me that because of the discussions we have here, he’s decided to create his own podcast. The conversations he had here inspired him to follow his personal projects.”

Overall, these events are meant to leave those who attend these events feel a sense of entrepreneurship and leave inspired to continue their own personal projects and career goals.