A NEW AUDIO PROJECT ABOUT WOMEN, WRITING, WORKING, WHATEVER.

Life TK is a new audio project about professional life in your twenties from those who have been there before, hosted by me, Amanda Woytus. Each episode is an interview with one of my favorite writers, editors, or journalists in her thirties and beyond, about the jobs she held between her first gig and most recent. (“TK” is an editing mark that means some information is “to come.”)

I created Life TK after realizing that bios of my favorite women writers touched on their first jobs, glossed over the next ten, fifteen, or twenty years, and then jumped to their most notable, remarkable, important achievements, without acknowledging all the (boring? discounted? what-am-I-doing-here?) work it took to get there.

And with good reason. Who wants to hear about the less impressive jobs on someone’s résumé? I do. I think there’s a story to tell—about persistence, about all the soul-searching you have to do in your twenties while you’re figuring out your career, about how lost you can feel sometimes—and that’s Life TK.

It's crucial for twentysomethings to understand the majority of successes are not overnight, especially now. Women entered the workforce in large numbers only sixty years ago, and there’s little research devoted to our professional lives. Studies report millennials think about the office more than older generations; however, there is a trend of women burning out and leaving the workforce before age thirty. One piece of research looked at the attrition rate of journalists—women disclosed feeling overloaded and unable to meet expectations. In another survey, only 53 percent of women respondents said they learned from older female coworkers; just 14 percent of respondents felt millennials are ready to lead in the workplace. Women in their twenties need to be inspired and encouraged by, as well as connected to, women who have been there before. Life TK will promote intergenerational understanding in the office by linking women together through anecdotes and advice.

So what else can you expect from Life TK? This is a project about staying the course, showing up every day, doing all of the grunt work you're overqualified for in your twenties, even if there's no guarantee it will lead to the results you desire. This is a project about having no idea what you’re doing and doing it anyway. This is a project about the advice you need from the mentors you might not have. It’s a project about when the future was still unwritten, from the women who wrote it.

The Journalism and Women Symposium honored me with its 2017 Conference and Mentoring Project Entrepreneurial Fellowship for Life TK.