A nice day

It was a really nice day, so nice to distract me from studying for the mid-term exam coming next week. The weather is really mean to me.. It should have gotten better kindly way before the exam. All right, a life isn't such easy.
One of my colleagues in Japan who is helping a student organization, through my company's pro-bono program, which is aiming at international leadership development introduced to me a student who was coming to New York. She seemed to be interested in visiting Columbia campus, so we met close to the campus in the morning today and walking around the campus.
In some while, after we saw around the business school building, libraries, she said that she would like to interview me. Now I got to know a reason for something. Though, she mentioned "interview" when she e-mailed me for the first time, I didn't pay much attention to the word. But, it turned out that she wanted to interview me. She's been writing interview articles for the organization. Though I said to her that I am not a person worth interviewing, I couldn't treat her badly, moving to the coffee shop in the journalism school building (actually, the coffee shop serves the best sandwiches inside/around the campus in terms of quality and price.).
We spent more than 2 hours, talking over coffee and I faced a bombardment of questions about my past, future plans, the future of Japan, the Japanese youth of now etc!! Since I didn't prepare answers to difficult questions such as the future of Japan, I felt sorry to ponder over answers long before I answered to her...In turn, she also showed her view and talked a little bit about herself. I was surprised at her story. Opposite to her soft and "cute girl" appearance, she has such an adventure spirit to go to India, staying there for a couple of month! Even though she is still a sophomore in undergrad, she's been thinking about her career after the graduation. I was not such a good student to think about the future at her age, rather chasing badminton shuttle cocks everyday....
I gave her three advises. First, meet as many people as possible. Sometimes people tend to get strapped with a bias about industries and companies. And students seem easy to develop this tendency. For instance, a student sometimes can compromise his/her ambition when facing other people's denial backed up with unreliable rumor. It makes no sense to accept literally what others say especially when those who deny his/her view are totally outsider of an organization where he/she wants to go. Second, expand the path ahead. It's hard to see what career suits one best. For me, even I don't know what suits me let alone an undergrad.  Though, there are some very popular careers such as consulting, investment banks etc, it's worth expanding the world beyond those careers. In some sense, this leads to the first point. But nobody can know a career to which he/she doesn't pay attention to. A student has the privilege. The last thing is think globally. This has been very obsolete word but I've been very concerned about how seriously the Japanese young generation of her age are taking the momentum to push Japan into global competition. According to a survey to juniors in Japanese universities, a majority of them showed negative feeling to going abroad. I just thought "Stop kidding". Coming to Columbia, I found people from emerging countries are way way way more ambitious and aggressive than I expected. We cannot avoid competing with those aggressive countries when a domestic market is shrinking. How to prop up Japan in order not to make the country falter from the economic prosperity? We need to go abroad. That's the only way for Japanese to survive or we die at the end of the day. I've been very concerned. Fortunately, she has enough global mind that my advise sounded meaningless. I just wanted to touch this point if my interview would be shared with a group of students.

I hope she meet the best career for her and I believe that she makes it.