Careers and Fears

I used to want to be a door holder for a living. In third grade we had to sign up for weekly tasks, and mine was always the door holder. First I would hold the door open for all my shrieking eight-year-old classmates and then I would run as quickly as I could to get to the front of the line...and I would repeat the process all the way to the lunch room. It wasn't the most glamorous of jobs, but I liked it.

In fourth grade we didn't have weekly tasks anymore. I could no longer serve as door holder, so I found a similar calling--as elevator operator. I got the idea on a visit to a London hotel over the summer. I don't know what constituted its tremendous appeal--the brass buttons, double breasted suit, or just the image of spending all day riding the elevator and getting to talk to many different kinds of people.

Regardless, I liked the idea. I even told Tony, the elevator operator at the hotel, that he had better watch out because I would come back and take his job. He smiled, but he didn't seem too threatened. I guess he was right.

Since then I have always had a different answer to the infamous question: What do you want to be when you grow up? Author of children's books, photographer, chef, hotel manager, management consultant.... Now I just say that I don't know. Because I don't, and I know it. Of course, I can make something up on the spot to see people's reactions, but when I really want to be truthful, I can admit that, after two years of college, I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.

During the summers after my first and sophomore years of high school, I did all kinds of exciting things. I participated in archaeological digs, studied German in a small town in Austria and helped gather data for a study on plant life and mammals (shrews, rats and mice, more specifically--they really are cute, despite what some people may say) on an island off the coast of France. But then I got the strange idea that I had to spend my summers finding out what I might want to do "later."

I used to be a science person, so in the summer after my junior year I decided to work in a lab in Paris. It was interesting work, and I could use my newfound knowledge later on in the summer to explain to my German teacher what might be the cause of her battle with the 5 o'clock shadow. Of course I couldn't be too sure about it--I only knew that "Daisy" (a kind of gene) might have caused some of her problems. But at the end of the month I craved sunshine, and it started to grate on me that I had to take off my shoes at the end of the day to avoid potentially poisoning my dog and cat.

Perhaps I should have realized that the lab was not the place for me at lunchtime on my first day of work. At precisely 12 noon, I joined the rest of the lab downstairs at the university cafeteria. To my horror I found only some oily substance resembling beef (which, at the time, I would not touch) and overcooked oily potatoes. I thought I was not being too demanding when I said all I wanted was a simple sandwich. Little did I know.... I ended up in a nearby bar with a very large, very oily tuna sandwich. I brought my meal back to the table amidst stares, which only grew more astonished as I dripped oil all over my lab coat. From then on I brought my own lunch.

At the end of the summer I knew that I could never work in a lab--although I did not officially stop being a science person until Chem 10 robbed me of any inspiration I had ever gotten from studying the periodic table. By last summer, I figured it was time to try something entirely different, so I interned at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the Education Department.

Although I enjoyed some aspects of my internship, which allowed me to meet amazing jazz players at the airport (with the big sign I made with red magic marker) and participate in seminars on how to use art to teach, I guess it wasn't a good sign that I had to draw a picture of a window by my desk to imagine the outside world. Palm trees, turquoise water, white sand, sunset--I liked my picture.

I wanted to go to the place I drew. While on the phone endlessly calling people for arts internships to put on the World Wide Web, I would stare longingly at my picture and dream...of being a bartender on a Caribbean island.

This year I thought I should learn from my experiences--after all, that's why we voluntarily work long hours over the summer for little pay, right?

The logical choice for my summer employment was Club Med. Of course, I didn't get around to applying, probably because of the nagging doubt that I will ever be lucky enough to work anywhere with better weather than New England. So I have ended up with a job which is really exciting and is teaching me a lot.

I now know that, one day, I hope to have a job which allows me to make college students stuff envelopes, make packets and carry boxes. Yesterday I talked to my cousin and found out that, although he is in Paris and working on what would seem to be an entirely different type of job, he and I have almost exactly the same job. Except that I get to carry heavy boxes and, when I am really lucky, enter data in the computer. Of course, they keep telling me how good I am at my job (I don't go to Harvard for nothing), so I could think about a career in stuffing or manual labor.

But I think I agree with my cousin about what we should really wish for our future careers. We need to hope that, one day, two cousins will speak across the Atlantic and one will say to the other: Olivia made you do that? Wait until you hear what Turi made me do. 100,000 envelopes in ONE DAY! Then we can really feel that we have made it.

Or maybe I should go back to the bartending idea. Perhaps that's for next summer.