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Erik: How do you define and measure success in what you do?
Kyung: I think it’s a very multi dimensional answer cause it doesn’t have to do so much
with just career success or family success, but really at the end of the day being at
a place where you feel that you’ve made a real difference, that you’re your doing
work with meaning, that really gets you up in the morning and that makes you feel a fulfillment
and to me that would be my definition. I remember when I was a freshman in college and I took
a sociology class called The Family. And it really had to do with sort of defining for
me as a young woman what it was that I wanted to have in my life and I knew that, I mean
not all of us I went o a woman’s college, we were all sitting there and the professor
said ‘how many of you want to have a career?’ and we all, you know, our hands shot up and
then it’s like ‘how many of you want to have marriage and family?’ and all of our
hands shot up and you know, I think it was a very, very hopeful place and I think, you
know, it was realistic but I think that we all defined success that way, I know I certainly
did. To be able to be sort of unhampered in our pursuit of that and I think that for me
as I have gone on and have had various times in my life where I’ve focused very, very
*** my career and then at other times focused more on my family. There definitely
are choices that you have to make, I think women and men, but particularly women I think
we come to a place sometimes where just as mothers that we have to consciously prioritize
and I know that for me that choice happened at one point where really I could have made
a decision to ramp up my career or not and I chose not to. I mean for a while in my career
I actually stopped working full time but I think that opened up the possibility for me
to be able to get more involved with my community, to be able to do more volunteer work, to get
more engaged and informed about the nonprofit field which kind of led to a new career for
me.