Posted by It’s come to me slowly, a revelation of sorts: I went to the Yale they promised me. I went to the school of the catalogue quote-box, a “hotbed” of aspirant genius. Perhaps it’s nostalgia (or epiphany, some three years late?) but it seems now you laureates were everywhere.
I remember. Senior year I watched you rally, heard you singing, saw your plays — and wondered how you artists, bards, and activists were faring. I saw you at the Career Services office, working your ways through massive grant guides. I met you at the Q&A on P&G then on TFA. I heard you with the law school adviser, balking when she asked, “Why law?” (I was waiting outside). Three years on, I fear for your (our) kind.
The trouble it seemed/it seems is this: we don’t know where we’re going. Our personal passions, as potent as they are, do not give rise to prepared professions. Our myriad talents do not seem to converge upon one — or more importantly: one lucrative — career. As such, we’ve lapsed into months-long lamentations about our accursed lack of direction.
It hasn’t always been this way. We used to be mechanically motivated — overachievers of the surest sort. Our four-point program, The Plan, was this: to graduate college, work for a year, get a professional degree, ascend to World Dominance. Never we mind the obvious: that we never defined what World Dominance entails. “Rule the world” (or save it) was a perfect answer for all who asked:
What do you want to do after you graduate?
The question has become more of an accusation than an inquiry of late. For, in a startling, unsettling turn of events, we don’t have any plans. Somewhere between our first day at college and our last corporate interview things fell apart. The goals we finished high school with (First Lady-President! Next Michael Jordan! Find cancer’s cure!) are fading away. In their absence we must decide what we truly want to do – and are discovering that we don’t (that we never did?) know.
The I-bank/Law school/Med school Model of Success presents three options:
1) To make lots of money now.
2) To go to professional school now and make lots of money later.
3) To make lots of money now then go to school and make even more money sooner.
In desperation almost, we’ve begun to subscribe to this Triumvirate Version of success. We artists and actors have begun to think that maybe banking is not so bad. Consulting has become a seductive lesser of evils, second only to the catholicon that is Law School.
It’s the validation sticker we’ve worn for years to explain (or excuse) our interests. When people ask, “What are you studying?” our answer has always been two-fold. First, the program (“History,” “Theater”) and then the plan: “But I’m going to law school.” How quickly the confusion (“American Studies?!”) gives way to “Aha!”’s of comprehension.
Of course, now that the day is upon us we must appraise the master plan. The most fickle among us (myself included) seek solace in the Apply and Defer Approach. Gifted scholars, dancers, teachers, poets — we know we don’t want to be lawyers. But in the name of appeasing parents, perceptions, and Pell Grants, we log onto LSAC.
A word. If you:
a) Are going to law school because you aren’t going to medical school,
b) Are going to law school because “it just comes next,” or
c) Imagine law school as an extension of your liberal arts education,
please do reconsider. Going to law school with no interest in legal practice is much like fulfilling all the pre-med requirements without any inclination to become a doctor. Unless you truly adore math and science you’d have worked too hard for too little. No less than Organic Chemistry, Civil Procedure is too dense to be done as an option-opening exercise. Misguided are we who envision a PoliSci playground for polymath and public servant alike. Like an amplified version of vocational training law school is designed to prepare professionals for their practice. The refinement of an English vocabulary is a side-effect not an objective of legal education. Consider: HLS “Second-year Basic Courses”1 are: Accounting, Constitutional Law, Corporations and Taxation. If two or more seem tedious, perhaps law’s not for you?
Or perhaps it’s the money that piques your interest, as it did mine; frankly, as it does mine. $100,000 would relieve my proud mother of my myriad loans in a matter of months. But those six-figure salaries are awarded primarily to starting associates in Corporate Law. If you are opposed on principle to the professional manipulation of money, your Benz is a long time coming. So it goes for those who seek reprieve in financial services. We (especially the “we” with debt) have grown weary in The Struggle. When everyone else was doing it, being broke seemed enlightened. But the recession has rubbed all the rugged charm off of structural unemployment. As the debts add up and our twenties wind down, temporary tedium seems worth the tender.
But I wonder. What is the difference between the investment banker and the twenty-first century sharecropper? Instead of other men’s land he tills other men’s money. He rises at the crack of dawn and works to the point of exhaustion, planting and growing the “crop” of those richer than he. At the end of the season he gives the landowner (not to mention the landlady) the bulk of the harvest, keeping a minute fraction for himself. It doesn’t seem right.
I understand that there are those of you whose motives transcend the money. Some of you find the thrill of the trade as appealing as the paycheck. Others find inspiration in the financing of dreams, in funding for your families. I’m thinking of a friend who truly enjoys economics, another who has promised to put cousins through college. For them a means-to-an-end mentality may render fulfilling the jobs they choose. But what of us, we seeming martyrs, whose real passions lie elsewhere? Can we compensate with 80K incomes what we lack in inspiration? Is happiness so cheap?
I am neither rich nor naïve and understand that recent grads must eat. I understand also that anything done solely for money will ultimately compromise the soul. I am speaking to you creative geniuses whose works adorn most college campuses. I am writing to you educated activists who want to open youth centers, create AIDS foundations, reform hometown schools, write books. Who told you that i-banking and law school are the only two paths to fulfilling your dreams? Have you asked yourselves, as confusing as it is: what do I want to do this fall? Can you ask yourselves, as hard as it is: am I in it for the money? Will you dare yourselves, as risky as it is, to do the work you’ve been called to?
I am talking to you — to you secret garden songbirds who sing in the bathrooms of your investment banks; to you poets and aspirant playwrights who write too well to stop to write the law; to you consultant-cum-clandestine thespians who will never know peace if you leave theatre alone: you say you don’t know what you want to do and maybe you don’t — but don’t you? There are only so many things you don’t mind getting up at 5 am to do. There are only so many talents that come to you as easily as breath. Understand this. There is something so challenging/exhilarating/promising about the possibility of experiencing/enjoying/employing your talents for all they’re worth. Even if it turns out that your writing is not worth $100,000/year; even if it turns out that your cooking is not worth $100 — perhaps it’ll turn out that your own sense of fulfillment is worth so much more?
Or perhaps I’m being idealistic? I offer no concrete alternatives to the professions I’ve critiqued, not least because I struggle each day to find them. It is a woman — young, poor, passionate — who pens these pearly things to you; who claims: your fulfillment has less to do with your career choice than with the (true) motive behind it. If you don’t know where you’re going, let your passions point the way. If you cannot answer: “what are you doing next year?” perhaps you might start with “what makes me happy?” Your apprehensions may become immaterial in the face of the fulfillment this answer can bring.
Last week I ended my marriage of convenience with Corporate Glory to pursue a long-term love affair with Art. A friend, apprised of the divorce, left Letters to a Young Poet outside my door. He inscribed the inside cover with this: “I know you have elected to create as most do not, and for such I know no truer lines.” Leaving off questions of age and entitlement (what, in the end, has one twenty-something-year-old to say to another?) I want to compel you young and drifting to pursue as professions your personal passions.
Rainer M. Rilke can tell you far more than I about living a life in the name of your forte. I’ve conjoined a few of his passages, replacing with brackets ([ ]) the words write and writer. Put in those brackets whatever it is you believe/fear to admit you are called to do. If it is acting, insert “act;” if it is “working with children,” add that. Then take these words (amended for you) and confront that weighty question.
What do you want to do after you graduate?
You may find, as it’s said, that you stand on the verge of great decisions — not easy ones.
Rilke writes:
I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must [ ]. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be a [ ]. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from the outside .
Nobody can counsel you, nobody. There is only one single way . . . Search for the reason that bid you [ ]. This above all – ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I [ ]? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if the answer should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple, “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity.
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