Samantha Politinsky

A lot of it has to do with my parents, my mother and my dad, and our whole family as a unit. I was raised by two really, really cool, hardworking individuals who've kind of chosen the unbeaten paths for a lot of their careers. My dad works in tech, which isn't that crazy, but he's never stayed somewhere where he's felt mistreated or where what's happening is unethical. And my mother has kind of done the same thing her whole career in making sure that whatever we're doing, we are contributing to the people around us in a way that makes us feel good at the end of the day. That's kind of bred me to sort of be that sort of community-focused individual, whether it's my brother who has the children, or me who has a long career that I hope to keep going with. I also have really good friends, and one of the great things about my collegiate experience is I made some of the best friends in the world, and I feel like they contribute to my mission at all times. Just surrounding myself with people that make me feel like I'm getting closer to a goal, even when I feel stagnant.

My mother and I are very close, and we are in very similar fields. She told me when I was very young to chase your passion. You might make more money doing something that feels okay in the moment, or that you feel you can live with, but the more important thing is having something that you feel like you can contribute to, and at the end of the day, you'll feel positive about being there. That's kind of been my mantra throughout my whole life, and making sure that everything I do, I do ethically, and kind of making sure that even if I'm not loving what I'm doing, I'm at least doing it in a way that I can feel good about at night.

Find your community. I think it's easy to sort of get sidelined in figuring out what you're doing or what you're supposed to do, but if you find your people first and then go from there, you can usually find what the passion is underneath. You just have to find it through the people that you know.

The biggest challenge is that it's incredibly difficult to do anything ethically at this current moment in politics, and trying to hold on to your values while also trying to work and make money has been one of the most difficult things I've found to do post-grad. There'll be opportunities, and then I'll find out what the opportunity is, and it'll instantly make my skin turn, and I don't want to do it. Making sure that you're not just looking for work, but you're looking for work that adds value - and with all of the job cuts that we've seen in public administration and all of the government jobs, they're gone. So finding something is hard enough, but finding something with meaning has been exponentially harder. I think every woman, man, whatever, whoever is looking for work has that same feeling in my industry. But there's so much opportunity because now is the time when all of the change is starting. Coalitions, they're not built overnight, and they're not built during good administrations that have little push. What we're feeling right now is important, and building that coalition, making the changes now, so that way we can implement them later, it starts today. Making sure that we don't get sidelined by the hurts that we're feeling and the disengagement that we're experiencing, and making sure that we keep pushing, because if we don't keep pushing, we're not going to get to the point where we were post 1965. I think we're in another realm of that, where we're going to go on to this new sort of equitable fairness thing within the next 5 years, but if we don't push now, we won't get there.

I think ethics are really important to me, making sure that I'm contributing to something that I can say is a good thing at the end of the day. And making sure that not only am I chasing something I'm passionate about, but that can have real-world impacts on my community.