A day in the life of an…aspiring professor, Eric Christensen

“Finding a balance between security and passion”

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Eric Christensen is a senior HR analyst in his full-time job, but also part-time lecturer in Industrial and Organisational Psychology at San Francisco State University. Eric lives in the San Francisco area with his wife, Teresa, and their 2 cats, Lavender and Sephiroth. Eric talks openly about his challenges with anxiety over the years, which in younger days led him to lean towards “safe” if less personally rewarding jobs. As time has gone on, he feels more able to “take risks” and has begun finding ways in both his day and evening jobs to be more “creative” and also work more “in line with my values”. The values of “helping people” and “authenticity” are of primary importance to Eric, and he achieves both of these aims in big and small ways in his two different roles. 

Read on to learn more about Eric! 

A typical day in my life begins when I wake up around 7am. Three out of the five working days I have to be at the office of the Water Department where I work in San Francisco. On those days I drink some coffee and eat a very quick breakfast and hit the road. The office is about an hour's drive from where I live. When I arrive I’ll grab another coffee, sit down and log in for the day. Most days are the same. I’ll start by checking emails. Usually there’s a meeting or two early in the day. It might involve how well we’re doing at hiring. That’s my main role there - seeing if we can hire more people to work there. Sometimes there’s some Excel spreadsheet type work to do between meetings. For example, it might be calculating test scores to see who is the most qualified to be hired. I’ll also post job advertisements sometimes, and then review applications as they come in. That all takes me until 5pm or so. Usually around 11am or 12pm I’ll squeeze in a lunch break of some kind, and maybe go for a walk if I need to during the day. This is summer break and I’m not teaching for a while, but during the semester after work I would drive to San Francisco State University and set up my computer and get ready and deliver a lecture in hybrid format two nights per week. When I have free time I like to jog or watch TV or take a nap. 

Eric at home with Sephiroth

So in the last year or so I’ve been a part-time lecturer at San Francisco State University in addition to my day job. That’s been probably the most rewarding role I’ve had but also the most stressful as it's on top of a 9 to 5 role. I taught courses including Introduction to Industrial Organisational Psychology, which is the same course I studied myself 10 years ago. One thing I’ve enjoyed about teaching is just making the PowerPoint slides, adding little graphics to them. Things like that. I think that desire to be creative in however small a way is going to be important for me going forward because that self-expression gives you energy to work. I’ve found if I’m doing something a bit creative then the work comes naturally and I look forward to it, in contrast to some other kinds of work that are draining and an effort to do.

For me I think career success is striking a balance between two things - the necessity of paying the bills and earning enough to maintain our lifestyle, but also wanting to live and work in line with my values. I need to keep enough money coming in, which is why I still have to do some kind of full-time day job. But then also figuring out a way to make sure at least some of my work is going towards improving people’s lives in some way. The teaching has been helpful for that. But even in my day job I look for ways I can, for example, lighten the load of a co-worker which makes it more rewarding and contributes to a sense of career success. 

“I was realising I needed to take some risks 

and do some things that were uncomfortable 

in order to live more by my values and actually help people 

rather than limiting myself to a regular job 

where I was maybe helping people 

but mostly just doing paperwork”

Hybrid working whilst teaching at SFSU

A formative conversation for me took place between me and my late Uncle who passed away a couple of years ago. At the time I was torn between becoming an Architect or a Psychologist. After a minute or two listening to my dilemma, my uncle said to me “well, why don’t you do both?” That’s probably the best piece of careers advice I’ve been given. Even though I didn’t go on to do either of those careers, it opened my mind to doing multiple roles, which I am doing now. His words stuck with me in terms of not limiting myself to one thing or another. So if it’s about paying the bills or helping people, it’s not like I have to choose between those two. I can somehow do both. 

My mental health challenges touch on my whole career. The whole reason I originally became a business major rather than doing psychology or architecture was that I wanted to be secure and safe and have enough money to live independently. And then I ended up staying in some very boring government jobs because I wanted the money to be there and to be safe and secure. And this all relates to my anxiety because I kind of am a fearful person, and I worry about the worst case scenario. So it results in a tendency to always choose the safer option because I’m trying to relieve the discomfort of worrying about things all the time. Staying in those government jobs was a response to my anxiety. I think if I were really following my heart I would transition fully to teaching even though the money would be less, and the uncertainty would be greater around whether I could pay the bills. So there’s still that fear that comes in. But I think little by little I’m trying to let go of that and take more risks that ultimately are consistent with what I want to do and my values. It’s always a little bit of a tug of war - do I follow my anxiety and do what’s safer, or do I let go of that and trust that things will somehow be OK?

San Francisco Civic Center in the neighbourhood where Eric works 

The biggest career transition I’ve made was moving from the most recent Federal agency I worked at which is Veterans Affairs. When I left that job and came to the Water department where I am now I lost a lot of job security. When I worked at those other government organisations there’s a reputation that once you get into them you’re set for life. It’s very difficult to be fired. From my perspective it was really comfortable because I thought I’m going to be OK and be able to support myself and my family - even if it’s just a cat family! But the work was not very stimulating. So when I decided to move to a local government job where I am now, I have less job security but the work is more interesting. It was a big shift for me from perfect safety to vulnerability.

I think this most recent period has been my career highlight so far. Finally teaching a class about a year ago which I’d wanted to do for about 3 or 4 years. I knew I wanted to teach a class but I avoided it for a while because I didn’t know how much stress that would cause me and how I would cope with that stress. So finally doing it is my most successful moment career wise. There was a cluster of different things that happened around the same time. Teresa and I got married, which perhaps gave me the boost of confidence I needed to take that work related risk. So for a moment I finally got things in alignment and was able to do multiple things that were important for me. And now I have to figure out how to either keep that going or shift a little bit. We’ll see what happens next! 

If you would like to reach out to Eric please follow this link to his personal website: https://www.ericfavrochristensen.com/

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