How To Land A Job...On The Set of "Pretty Woman"

YoPro: What Not To Wear by yoproblog


I attended a conference over the weekend with the usual panels, Q&A, networking session, and obligatory post-event happy hour. What was unusual was the choice of outfits among my fellow attendees that seemed to pass for business casual. Emphasis on the casual. 


Their attire struck me as unusual not because I could have babysat most of them and therefore am generationally sartorially out-of-touch, but because the school that I attend is very career-oriented. It encourages students to obtain internships and attend networking events within the first weekend on campus. Consequently, the undergraduates with whom I attend school are networkers on steroids. So it surprised me when I walked into the conference center and the first two women I saw were wearing blazers, but had decked out their lower halves with shorts and a mini skirt respectively. Granted they were wearing black tights, but when you see hemlines that high, they turn heads. 


Most of the young men women at the conference nailed it and looked every bit the yo-pro, but there were certain minor things that I felt compelled to tell my young friends are still not appropriate at a professional event. Things like "hooker heels"-- 5 inch heels representing every color of Tropical Skittles that sound so plastic everyone knows you bought them at Forever 21-- or shoulder-grazing earrings and ironic hairbows. I love me some early Madonna and fully believe that you should "Express Yourself," but there is a fine line between personal self-expression and just too personal. 


Bro-pros, you don't have much to worry about in this department because it's pretty hard to screw up your uniform (unless you have a thing for deep Vs or don't own an iron). So here are some of my biggest (female) offenders:

The 30 Under 30 Bucket List

I live by to-do lists, and by virtue of this habit, one of my guilty pleasures is tinkering with my ongoing bucket list. I have a perpetual fear of not "carpe-ing the diem" while I have time, health, and freedom, so I like to curate my bucket list in order to remind me to get off my ass and live my youth to the fullest.

I was introduced to two "Life Lists" in high school during the college admissions process (and during a Leadership class taken to fulfill a "practical art" requirement: go figure), and while they're about as cheesy as the "Wear Sunscreen" speech, they had a lasting impact on how I think about how I should spend my days on this rock.
Hugh Gallagher's College Essay
John Goddard's Life List

One of the fears that I think a lot of yo-pros have is that your life suddenly becomes a failure if you don't have your act together by age 30. Oddly enough, another fear is that you die at 30-- poof! life becomes not worth living and all you have to look forward to is the slow descent. I have put a stake in the ground that these fears are without merit, especially because 1) I will certainly not have my life together by 30, and 2) A lot of the kick-ass yo-pros in my life are 30+. Most of them are just getting started, and precisely because they're on the wrong side of 30, they're more knowledgeable, articulate, confident, well-traveled, and yes, even more attractive. Heck, Bethenny Frankel told me tonight on Bravo that she finally "made it" at age 40. So while the fear of my coach of youth suddenly turning into a pumpkin still lingers, I'm confident that life will in fact go on when the clock strikes 30.

But in order to light a little bit of that fire under my ass, I polled my friends and colleagues to give me one item from their to-do list before they turned 30, and the end result is the 30 Before 30 Bucket List.
(Video after the jump)

What's In a YoPro's Bag?

Recently I’ve been wondering why no young professionals have been advocating for mandatory chiropractic coverage in the universal health care debates. While common wisdom would cause one to think that our nation’s elderly would be most in need of chiropractic care, I beg to differ. As any YoPro knows, as a species, we carry our lives with us. Once we’re up, we don’t stop going until 8pm at the earliest and we need a survival kit to tackle the day’s adventures. This survival kit is damn heavy, and our shoulders and backs are paying for it dearly.

We carry these gigantic backpacks and messenger bags like we’re hiking the Appalachian Trail for the next six months. It takes five minutes for us to find anything because we “know it’s in here somewhere” and another five minutes to assemble everything in it just to put the thing on. Once we have it on, it’s too much work for us to take it off, so we just pretend like you’re the one in the way getting on the subway or passing through the lunch line rush.

Because I am secretly mortified that I’m taking out small children, dogs, and tall buildings when I pass, I try to use Fridays to prepare to carry less stuff with me. This is especially necessary on Fridays, because once you’ve tried to squeeze your gigantic bag into a crowded happy hour, you suddenly realize the asinine amount of crap you carry with you. I once tried to meet up with friends on the Frying Pan—a floating dive bar that is literally a boat at Pier 66 in New York City’s West Village—and carried a backpack, laptop case, and purse with me through one square foot of available space among 200+ YoPros. I’m lucky I didn’t get tossed overboard.

Let’s analyze the typical arsenal of essentials I carry with me on a daily basis:

To Wear or Not to Wear

I had a bit of a Claudia Kishi moment when I got dressed this morning. For those of you who don't get the reference, you clearly were not a girl growing up in the 90s with an unhealthy obsession with The Babysitters Club (P.S. Best blog ever). To paraphrase the great novelist Ann M. Martin, "She was wearing a canary yellow oversized silk men's shirt with skinny jeans and flats, with a stack of bracelets halfway up her arm that combined a silver cuff, periwinkle, yellow, and peach resin bangles, and delicate silver hoops." While I didn't think I would snag Scott Schuman's eye, I did think that I had pulled something relatively cute together. But I couldn't help but pause in the mirror and wonder, "Should I be wearing this?"

Networking: A Necessary Evil

Networking.

Is there any word that strikes more dread in the hearts of young professionals everywhere? Apparently not, because last night I attended a young professionals in PR networking event where more than 70 students and young professionals RSVPed "yes" to the invitation. There was a veritable cattle call on Eventbrite when the email hit our inboxes and came through our Twitter feeds. I generally consider myself pretty hip and with it, someone who has her finger on the pulse of what's cool, but I don't get the young professional bloodthirst to attend these types of events. Truth be told, I didn't want to go at all. There was not a bone in my body that felt, "Heck yes I want to walk into a room full of strangers, eat finger food touched by too many fingers, and force awkward conversation with people for three hours!" And yet I showed up at 6:30pm sharp with my business cards at the ready in my pocket.