Increasingly, freshmen arrive in my office for advice already having declared a major — on a signed piece of paper, before they arrive on the first day of orientation. They hit the ground at college already running at breakneck speed, thinking they know what they want to do after graduation. They seem bent on getting their undergraduate years over as soon as possible.
Declaring a major during the freshman year might make sense for future neurosurgeons, who need to start early on their occupational requirements. It also makes sense, unfortunately, for future high-school teachers, whose entire curriculum is strictly regimented by the state. What surprises me, however, is the first-semester freshman who announces that he or she wants to be a marketing executive or a public-relations consultant or an investment banker. How the heck do they know at such an early age that they want to be in these careers?
Caught between the powerful forces of parents running out of tuition money, corporations wanting job-ready contributors to profits, and student anxiety about being gainfully employed come that fateful day in May, the old approach to a liberal-arts college education — the one I had, in which you were encouraged to take a year or two to explore a variety of subjects without knowing exactly how you would eventually earn your living from them — is dead. It’s a new age, with new pressures, new approaches to knowledge, new technologies to be learned, and new goals for the future.
For all my experience in advising, and my understanding of our new era, however, I’m always brought up short by the intelligent and earnest student who, at the beginning of his or her junior year, hasn’t yet declared a major and says, somewhat guiltily, “I’m not really sure what I want to do yet.” Hearing those words, I usually begin by saying, “That’s OK. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was your age, either.” Although we usually end up arriving at a major for the student — render unto Caesar and all that — I feel a little wistful about the student’s discomfort at having to choose. Sometimes I add a parting word to the effect that a major doesn’t necessarily commit one to a specific career path.
Actually, the only students who carry uncertainty with aplomb are the “creative” types on campus — i.e., the student painters, dancers, and poets — whose parents, fretting over the prospects for their artistic offspring, are undoubtedly pulling out whatever hair is left on their heads. They tend to take a little of this, and a little of that, before saying to themselves, “What I really like to do is make art.” Sounds like a recipe for hopelessness, doesn’t it?
But wait a minute, and hold on to your seats: I keep informal track of these things, and I find that my painting graduates seem to land rather splendidly on their feet. They end up with jobs in museums, galleries, the fashion industry, the Web world, and the commercial and design worlds. They get jobs whose titles they never knew existed until they graduated and went out job-hunting. A few of them — after a stint in graduate school, to be sure — end up trying to make it as artists in the Chelsea/Brooklyn scene.
Surprisingly, the world still can be your oyster. If you order your education à la carte, that is.
Image from Photobucket
