Narrating the professional self

Abstract

This presentation examines Russian Flagship students’ personal statements as they (the statements) evolve and change over time to reflect the students’ developing subject positions and group identities. The narrative approach that has been adopted by organizational studies (Gabriel, 2017; Schreyögg, 2005; Tirvassen, 2018) helps demonstrate how students construct the institution of the Language Flagship and their experience of it. Given that cultivating the next generation of global professionals is the primary mission of the Language Flagship, the study focuses on the students’ construction of the professional self, particularly on how they describe their immediate and future goals, how they develop the theme of purpose, how they connect events in their lives (e.g., chronological vs. causal relationships), and how they construct agency. The study revealed that students change their personal narratives over time, moving from generic and often flowery descriptions of their long- and short-term goals to more concrete ones. After approximately one year in the program, students begin to move from chronological to causal descriptions of events, portraying themselves as agents of change. When addressing the question of alignment between students’ goals and the Language Flagship mission, students either avoid or write very little about the institution of the Language Flagship. This inability to elaborate on the benefits of the program and the alignment between institutional and personal goals, combined with a somewhat narrow perception of one’s future professional life (98% of the students merely mention “a job with the state government” as their final target) warrants further investigation in order to delineate between genre conventions, lack of clear understanding of one’s position within the Flagship, the narrow understanding of the critical language initiative and the status of a critical language, and/or a limited access to information about career options and professional networks.