Alumnae Offer Life Lessons For New Grads

Graduation season has come around again, and with it, the celebrations of academic achievements and hard work. But after the caps are tossed and the diploma is secured, it’s not uncommon for anxiety to seep in. Today’s graduates face a tough job market due in part to hiring freezes and slowdowns, and to companies replacing entry-level jobs with tech-driven tasking. After sending out hundreds of applications, you might be lucky enough to get an interview with an AI bot — that is, if your resume gets past the other AI bot screening it.

But that’s not the only narrative for this moment. Two books by alumnae are aiming to combat new-grad dread while inspiring those already well into their careers: Khadijah Sharif-Drinkard ’93’s Power Reimagined: My Mission to Get It, Grow It, and Give it Away and Jodi Kantor ’96’s How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work.

Both are guides for figuring out how to begin “Adult Life,” penned by women whose careers have had challenges as well as accolades — Sharif-Drinkard is a senior VP at ABC News following leadership roles at BET and Nickelodeon; and Kantor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who helped ignite the #MeToo movement. Neither shies away from acknowledging how the world has changed since they graduated. But through their stories of starts and stops in their professional and personal lives, the two offer concrete examples of working through struggle and coming out stronger on the other side.

Powerful Thinking

Sharif-Drinkard had been thinking about writing a book for years. She wanted to share the story of her Harlem upbringing and how that led to a career as a senior executive for major entertainment companies. But Sharif-Drinkard didn’t just want to write a memoir –– she also wanted to articulate a model for others to follow.

“I really wanted it to make sense for people, for them to extract something,” she says. “I wanted Power Reimagined to be a toolkit or a roadmap.”

She wrote chapters sporadically for six years before finding a publisher and her throughline. The book is anchored by reflections on Sharif-Drinkard’s relationship to power in various forms — from finding sources of it to having it drained by burnout to replenishing it by giving it to others. Together, they illustrate the push and pull of power in her life, and what she’s learned about wielding it responsibly.

“I wanted to reframe it so that people could see that power in and of itself is not good or bad — it’s neutral. It’s how we use it that determines how it shows up,” Sharif-Drinkard says.

As she chronicles her school years in Harlem and her time at the College, Fordham Law School and beyond, she imparts wisdom about reclaiming power for yourself when it feels like you don’t have any, along with how to recognize which opportunities will build it up or drain it dry. From chapters about advocating for equal pay for herself and her colleagues, to taking a much-needed sabbatical to avoid burning out, she discusses what these experiences taught her about using, gaining and sharing power. Sharif-Drinkard names her mother, Amidah Salahuddin, her Harlem community and a junior high school teacher, Mrs. Griffith, when thinking about how she learned that being in control of her own actions and reactions to her environment is in itself a form of power, and one that set the stage for her deal-making career and for uplifting others.

“We’re living in times that are very challenging for all of us. There appears to be a stark binary of folks who have power and folks who don’t,” she says. “There’s this notion that if you don’t have control of all the things, then you don’t have power. But I think we do. You can still have power over your personal life. So the question is, what do we do with the things we can’t control? That’s my goal with this book, because while we can’t necessarily control all the ‘big things,’ we certainly can control things in our personal lives.”

Sharif-Drinkard says her favorite chapter to write was the story of meeting her husband, Craig Drinkard; she had him go through an application process before agreeing to be together (complete with a mission statement, reference checks and interviews). She credits their partnership with empowering her to continue on her trajectory, and even advocated for including the chapter about him after being told that most business books didn’t include love stories. Sharif-Drinkard also learned that a partnership didn’t have to involve martyrdom and lowering standards just for the purpose of being together, and that the right person wouldn’t be afraid of difficult questions and would lift her up, not drag her down. She encourages that robust vetting early in relationships and believes selecting a partner is one of the most critical life decisions.

“When I met Craig, I realized that he’s actually part of this whole thing; he’s going to help me soar even further,” Sharif-Drinkard says. “Reimagining what that relationship dynamic would be like was a big part of it, and that’s why I think asking those tough questions up front is so important. We do more research for colleges and jobs and we need to be as intentional and purposeful when looking for a life partner.”

While she hopes her book will have valuable takeaways for young people, she also wants those with established power to learn a few things, too. She encourages movers and shakers to view power sharing as a way to invest in the next generation.

“I do think there is a lack of accountability for what we need to do collectively to share power so that all of us can thrive,” she says. “I want to inspire people who have been holding or hoarding power for so long to open up the gates. When you do this, you become even more powerful.”

Starting Strong

After Kantor gave the College’s 2025 Class Day speech, she couldn’t stop thinking about the students she met during the writing process. In the midst of political differences and polarization, there was one thing uniting these young people — anxiety about how to start their next chapters. Kantor wanted to help.

“The stakes of work are collective. I care about these individual students, but I also know that the workplace is the engine that moves society forward,” she says. “We can’t afford for people, especially people with Columbia degrees, to give up on the workplace.”

Drawing from her speech, Kantor’s advice centers on two themes: identifying a need and honing a craft. She shares anecdotes from her life as well as the experiences of others who found their work after a series of missteps or mishaps (like being kicked off Spec, in Kantor’s case). She wants to dispel the persistent myth that career progression has to be a perfect, linear path from the beginning and demonstrate that it’s OK not to get it right from the jump. And she’s realistic about the uncharted territory that new graduates are walking into — her college-aged daughter imposed a “no false optimism” rule for the book — while acknowledging that for Kantor, struggle is where the most growth happened.

“My worry after speaking to many students at Columbia and elsewhere is that freedom, joy, exploration and experimentation have been replaced by perfectionism, anxiety, negativity and a fear that if you don’t start perfectly, you’re not going to succeed,” Kantor says. “The message I wanted to send is that starting is always a mess.”

The need plus craft equation, she says, is something she believes students should be thinking about during their college years, when they are inundated with messages about which jobs pay the most and which won’t be taken over by AI. She wants that process to be part of students’ lives from the first time they set foot on campus, but in a way that encourages them to consider what their strengths and talents are, which careers will utilize them to greatest advantage and which connections will help make their aspirations a reality.

“The best careers are based on having a craft, meaning you have some skill or expertise that not everyone has,” Kantor says.

That said, she recognizes that identifying a skill set while looking for a job to develop that very thing can feel like a bit of a black hole. With stories from her own life as well as from established executives and entry-level workers, Kantor offers real-life examples.

“For years, I’ve been reporting on the workplace and its technological transformation. I saw that young people now have it harder than we did,” she says. “We need to counteract that sterility and distance and dehumanization of the digital hiring process with more mentorship.”

That’s where the older generations come in. While the book is mostly written as a how-to guide for living through turbulent years, Kantor addresses the need for the rest of the adult population to recognize the struggles that today’s young people are facing. She hopes that those with more experience, both in life and career, will understand the role they can play in mentorship and guidance, and by being an example to look to.

“The process of students finding their life’s work is often too lonely and a free-for-all in which there is no clear path, and I think we can give them better support that yields better results,” Kantor says. “We can show that there is a coherent process to figuring it out.”