Meg Jay
She is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Virginia and maintains a private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Dr. Jay’s book, The Defining Decade, was a 2012 Slate.com Staff Pick and her 2013 TED talk “Why 30 Is Not the New 20″ has been viewed more than 2 million times. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Forbes, Psychology Today, and NPR.
Dr. Jay earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and in gender studies, from the University of California, Berkeley.
At Berkeley, Dr. Jay was a research associate on the Mills Longitudinal Study, one of the longest-running studies of female adult development in the world. Her research on women, depression, and gender was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, and was published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and as the Symonds Prize article in Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Her work on the assessment of depression has been published in Psychological Assessment.
An award-winning lecturer, Dr. Jay served as adjunct faculty at Berkeley where she taught Clinical Psychology, Personality Psychology, Social Psychology, and Psychology of Gender. Dr. Jay currently supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia.
Dr. Jay has served as a fellow for the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, and the Robert Stoller Foundation.
Dr. Jay earned a B.A. with High Distinction in psychology from University of Virginia. She spent her own early twentysomething years as an Outward Bound instructor.
“The one thing I have learned is that you can't think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do - something.”
“For the most part, "naturals" are myths. People who are especially good at something may have some innate inclination, or some particular talent, but they have also spent about ten thousand hours practicing or doing that thing.”
“How do you get the happy ending? John Irving ought to know. One of my favorite authors, Irving writes these multigenerational epics of fiction that somehow work out in the end. How does he do it? He says, 'I always begin with the last sentence ; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.' That sounds like a lot of work, especially compared to the fantasy that great writers sit down and just go where the story takes them. Irving lets us know that good stories and happy endings are more intentional than that. Most 20 something's can't write the last sentence of their lives. But when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their 30s or 40s or 60s -or things they don't want- and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time.”
“Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the twenty-first century opiate of the masses.”