WHEN IN CHICAGO… EMBRACING AMBIGUITY BY DANIEL PFEIL

Embracing and working through ambiguity is one of the most important skills that can be acquired. This has played a very active role in my life recently with the job process. I received a fantastic offer, but I knew that there were other options. I hadn’t even tried to apply to many places yet, was I going to give up all these potential opportunities? I agonized over the decision for days and did everything that an analytical engineer would do. I created pros and cons, process flows, and talked to the people closest to me. I was getting frozen and needed to make a choice.
I took a step back and realized that none of these lists would make my decision for me and decided to drive up to Chicago to experience the office firsthand. I came back with a gut feeling that this would be the right place to work. I had taken this inaction from analysis, and turned it into action through intuition. Now that I have made my decision I am doing everything that I can to retroactively make sure that it was the right one.
This was a great learning for me because even though I work on dealing with ambiguity every day in classes, it was significantly harder to implement into my own life. Now that I am aware this is still something I need to work on, I will be able to exercise my ambiguous muscle and be better prepared for future decisions.