Sujata Gidumal

Suji Gidumal landed her first job after college from a woman she sat next to on a plane. On break from Brown University, where she was majoring in comparative literature, Suji was flying to Miami with her mother. They were arguing about how to pronounce "Lululemon" when Suji's future boss at a PR agency got involved in the discussion. She later told Suji that "she had decided by the end of the flight that she was going to hire me."

Suji interned at the PR agency the summer after graduating and immediately accepted the subsequent full-time job offer. "By November, I knew that I didn't want that job," she said. Suji struggled with what she wanted to do next.

"It's hard not knowing what you're gonna do the following year when, since you were five years old, you've known exactly what you were gonna be doing come the following September," she said.

Highlights

Picking a college: I told my parents that I wanted to go to a school that wasn’t too small and that was in a place that wasn't too cold. And I ended up at the smallest, coldest school I applied to. So I don't know that I knew what I was looking for when I was applying to college.

The merits of a comparative literature degree: I definitely knew that comparative literature wasn't the most commercially viable of majors, but, you know, it never really bothered me. I wanted to study something that I was gonna enjoy, and I also really do believe that a liberal arts education teaches you more how to think in general and how to analyze and how to write as opposed to teaching you a marketable skill that you can then pitch to a certain job.

Job jitters: My first day of work, I still remember I was so nervous and just didn't know what to expect. I felt like, "I can't mess this up." And that's a pretty hard feeling, to feel like this is potentially going to help dictate the rest of my life.