BY BRIANNE SANCHEZ | Community relations manager, Des Moines University

For many young women (and their mothers), this holiday season held the anticipation of a fictional homecoming of sorts, with the release of the Gilmore Girls “A Year in the Life” reprisal. For fans, it was a warm and fuzzy chance to catch up with the cast of quirky Stars Hollow characters.

The show followed a single mother and daughter duo and touched on themes of ambition, education, work, love, family dynamics and social economics. Whether you care about where the characters ended up or not, the depiction of female characters of three generations reassessing goals and reinventing themselves could inspire reflection.

I am one of the fans whose life milestones and career aspirations were in sync with the bookish, journalism-bound daughter character of Rory. In 2007, Rory (Yale) and I (Mizzou) were both freshly minted college grads headed for Iowa. She (fictionally) covered the Obama campaign and I started my career at The Des Moines Register as a transplant from Chicagoland. Both of us shared the lofty aspiration of one day working as a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Nearly a decade later, our paths have diverged and (spoiler alert) neither of us achieved that goal.

But where Rory had apparently ridden out a floundering, flawed, big-city freelance career, I early on decided that wasn’t the life for me. I knew The New Yorker was a long shot and weighed the glamour of one day being on a Conde Nast masthead against the reality of my peers’ railroad apartments and drama. I ditched the Big Apple ideal for a more pragmatic approach and bought a historic house in Des Moines at age 25. I left full-time journalism and pursued a master’s in public administration, while working at Drake to avoid taking out loans. There were some tearful conversations with my mother about whether that meant I was “settling” for less than my dream.

The show pokes fun at the 30-something crowd who’ve been chewed up and spit out by “real life” and returned to Stars Hollow to lick their wounds. Rory doesn’t see herself as part of them, but she’s struggling to see herself at all. I think the crux of Rory’s plight, and that of so many millennials, is that our society tends to emphasize career readiness too narrowly. We’re focused on end goals at the expense of encouraging young women to work on WHO they’re going to be as people and professionals. And when that goal isn’t achieved, or the enthusiasm for it wanes, it feels like a massive failure. Instead, it could be an opportunity for us to identify and hone our core skills (communication, critical thinking, empathy and collaboration) that are applicable in myriad markets and make us better citizens.

For me, there wasn’t the quarter-life crisis meltdown we see in Rory (and some of our real-life millennial peers). I’ve had two kids and held three different professional positions and several volunteer leadership roles in that duration. I’m not saying my choices were better, and I still sometimes allow myself the “what if?” questions. But had I not taken an early route to reinvention, I might have ended up as adrift as Rory. (Although I would never have slept with a source — dressed as a Wookiee or not — because that’s just terrible journalism ethics.)  

Many of my peer mentors are in great professional positions and joke that we’re still trying to figure out “what we want to be when we grow up.” As bright, ambitious women, that can make us feel uncomfortable. Whether we’re in Stars Hollow, Iowa or anywhere in the world, we must remember: When we embrace and develop our core skills, stay open to possibility, encourage each other to leadership opportunities, acknowledge and move past our failings — we’re able to plot ourselves a more fulfilling storyline.

Connect with Sanchez via email, LinkedIn or telephone at 515-782-2363.