To parents of college students everywhere I say, back off!
In the brief time that I have been advising undergraduates at Penn State, I've seen a disturbing pattern. Under heavy pressure from mom and dad, my advisees think they have to lock their wheels onto a career track and aim themselves toward a secure, well-paying job. And they don't want to yet. Or they can't decide which track to take.
One student feels like he should get an internship at a newspaper but really wants to tour with a rock band first. Another wants to join the Peace Corps but will probably sell pharmaceuticals instead. A third would love to live in a city and write about dance, but is shying away from journalism because she fears getting stuck at a small-town paper.
Go, be, do, I tell them. They've got their entire lives to clock in, commute, make payments and wait for vacations. What's the rush?
The rush, apparently, is to get money. The misapprehension is that money buys freedom. Wrong. The people who make the most money are the ones who work the longest hours. They can't stop because they have to keep paying for all the stuff they've bought. The freest person in the world is a 22-year-old with a backpack who can almost live on air and is not picky about accommodations.
This makes my upperclassmen wistful. They would love to work just to make enough money to travel, then travel until the money runs out. But it's impractical.
I disagree. Here is this vast university, offering thousands of courses on every imaginable subject. The practical undergraduate is the one who recognizes that this may be the only chance she'll have to study Chaucer, the art of ancient Egypt, the history of jazz.
The practical graduate is the one who recognizes that he can squeeze a lot of living into the gap between college and marriage, mortgage and baby carriage.
You can map out your life down to the 10th of a mile, but the road always presents detours that the map did not foretell. Look at me, I say: B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature. A year unloading trucks. A year in a printing shop. Six months of bumming through Europe. Grad school. Two years of museum work. More grad school. A succession of newspaper jobs. And now, a university job. I'm probably about 10 years behind where I “should” be, career-wise. So what.
The hard part and the important part, I tell my charges, is figuring out what you love. Once you do, you owe it to yourself to try and see if the world will let you have it. If the path dead-ends, choose another one. If it goes somewhere, you may “arrive” only to discover you'd rather be somewhere else. Interests change. That's fine. Live several lives, if you can, instead of just one.
I felt silly saying such things at first. To a 40-year-old, they're a heap of cliches. But now I'm having delusions of wisdom because I see that to 20-year-olds whose experience of college has consisted of deciding which conveyor belt to ride, it's news to be told that a liberal education is a valuable thing in its own right. It's news that college goes by in the blink of an eye, that it won't matter in 10 years that they graduated a semester late because they changed majors. It's news that rushing headlong into a career looks silly when beyond the gold watch lies the grave.
In exchange for all this sage advice I ask my students only one thing: Don't tell your parents where you got it.