I’m a senior and I already regret everything I ever studied at college.
“A history major, eh,” says my uncle. We’re at a family event over winter break, and I’m getting quizzed on my future. “Sounds like a recipe for law school to me.”
I gulp and start to chew on a loose strand of my hair. “Well, you know I majored in literary arts, too.” My weak attempt at humor.
“You know, there’s a special field for the economics of history.” My uncle just won’t quit. “Econometrics. Very marketable.”
When we first arrived at Brown as wide-eyed first-years, Ruth Simmons told us that we should follow our passions, enjoy our time here, take the little quiet moments between classes to sit on the green to pursue our private projects — the short film, the future bestselling novel, the nonprofit for inner-city high school kids. Follow our dreams. It’s not a new message. Heck, we’ve been told that everyone is special since Barney.
But lately I’ve begun to feel like following my dreams is going to land me on the streets of New York, penniless, without even a gutter boyfriend to comfort me. I studied the liberal arts, and now it’s coming back to bite me in the ass. I should have majored in engineering or computer science or economics.
“I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” said President Obama at a Wisconsin General Electric Plant Jan. 30.
ET TU, OBAMA? I already have to deal with obnoxious questions from family. Whatever happened to the hope?
Yes, engineering and tech degrees pay more directly out of college, but a recent study by the Association of American Colleges indicated that overall average salary outcomes for humanities and social sciences majors are around the same in peak earning ages — from 56 to 60. Moreover, 93 percent of employers surveyed indicated that a candidate’s critical thinking and social skills were more important than their major. The notion that a concentration determines your destiny is farcical.
At Brown, we’re encouraged to study what we love and follow our dreams from day one. But nobody gave us an answer about what to do if we didn’t discover our dream, or if that passion didn’t find us. And the options that the CareerLAB offers us are extremely limited: Last week’s general career fair featured 25 technology companies out of 35 recruiting businesses. For the liberal arts-minded, that’s slim pickings. And our career advisers, expert at reorganizing our resumes, offer little more help for finding jobs than, “Use LinkedIn and Twitter.”
Increasingly, I’ve noticed my peers strive for jobs they would have scoffed at our first year: management consulting, finance, lawyerdom. Brown students go directly from college to medical school without ever working in a clinic, and burn out booking 80-plus hours a week on Wall Street.
Some people like consulting, finance and law school. That’s fine. It’s more than fine, it’s great! They’re prestigious, challenging fields with a huge payoff. But I get the sense that my fellow students enter them not out of some great passion or interest, but for the sense of security that comes with a six-figure salary and a two-year plan.
We’re lost. So instead, we turn to the casework books.
I don’t pretend to know what I’m doing any more than the next person. But sometimes I wonder: Why are we selling out for high-paying jobs with questionable social value? What happened to those first-years interested in art and altruism?
I understand the lure of Wall Street, the attraction of Bain, JP Morgan Chase and McKinsey. This isn’t the ’90s. People are struggling.
But Brown students are among the most — here’s that obnoxious Brown buzzword — privileged in the world. Most of us financially, yes, but all of us privileged by virtue of the talent and intelligence that allowed us to attend an institution like Brown in the first place. If we can’t afford to take some time to try different careers post-college and fight for something we love, who can?
I’m a senior and I’m terrified. I’m terrified of waking up in May and being forced out of my comfortable bubble, without my friends and my teachers and Health Services to treat every nervous tickle in the back of my throat. I don’t want to worry about rent, insurance and online dating. I love Brown. And I know my fellow seniors are also scared. We’re struggling to find what we want from life.
But I know I don’t want a boring life. I want to have an interesting job, one that I wake up in the morning and feel excited about. If it turns out that’s consulting or finance, so be it. But I don’t want to pigeonhole myself with graduate school or consulting or Wall Street prematurely. I don’t want to look back 20 years from now and have regrets. We’re so terribly young. We can do anything. We shouldn’t sell out.
Let’s wait until we’re 25 to do that.
Cara Newlon ’14 is a little to completely lost, but hoping for the best.
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