My time in Turkey was both personally transformative and was an excellent way to build key skills that would help me in any workplace. First and foremost, I acquired many important skills. Attention to detail, operational planning and work ethic were all generally extractable skills from my time there. More particularly I gained many skills based upon careful digging, keeping work notes, and a generalized knowledge of Turkish geology, topography and history. In addition, my work on site endeared me to several values. It is working on site with ancient objects and structures that I have truly internalized the adage of “Measure twice, cut once”. It was key to work in a way that was careful, well documented and respected the breakable nature of these structures and artifacts if you wanted to get anything out of the archaeological process other than a handful of pottery dust. However, we also worked under a timeline, so while our work was careful, it also had to be concise. In archaeology I learned what I would describe as something of an actuarial skill: balancing the risk of rapid movement with the reward of progress or determining how much work you could do on a wall to expose it before you threatened it’s structural integrity meant prioritizing certain values, balancing them against other ruling principles and in general taught important lessons in risk vs. reward. In a similar vein, the work on this site taught a great deal about personal resource management, and self-management in general. The groups we worked in were largely autonomous, so it was up to us to determine how much we could accomplish in any given amount of time, and then to hold ourselves to that standard. In addition, self-management was important physically. Oftentimes we worked in direct sunlight in 100+ degree weather. In those cases, you had to properly ration your water, set a pace, and get through the day in such a condition that you could do so again tomorrow. While the circumstances of any job will likely be drastically different than working on a mountain church on the coast of Turkey, these extreme conditions taught important values moving forward.