Just One Word: Plastics

A few weeks ago, a blockmate and I were walking down Holyoke Street, kicking a pebble back and forth in front of us and trying to decide what we would do after college. We had each considered and dismissed half a dozen prospective professions (we were, we decided, too hopeless at chemistry to be doctors, too bad at public speaking to be lawyers and too big to be jockeys) before he turned to me, eyes bright.

“You could be a sex columnist!” he cried. “Like Carrie Bradshaw!”

“Yes,” I said. “That would clearly be an ideal career for a prude.”

“No, you could make it all up. Like, ‘Last night’”—he surveyed the cars parallel-parked along Holyoke Street and the squirrels scampering across the MAC quad—“‘Last night, I discovered the… car…squirrel…position.’ It would be awesome.”

I stared at him.

“Well, I’d read it.”

It is a testament to just how worried I am about the future that I briefly considered his suggestion.

My personal history with career exploration has been a stormy one. During my freshman year of high school, our school district received a grant to administer career aptitude tests. During geometry class, we rated our skills and interests to learn our prescribed fate; a month later, we received the results. I was, the testing company advised, ideally suited to a career in mime. And if miming didn’t work out, “puppeteer” and “grocery bagger,” the company noted, would both be acceptable fallback positions.

So for six years, my career goals have been modest: I have wanted only a job that doesn’t involve being daubed with white greasepaint and pretending to be trapped in an invisible box. As these criteria are fairly broad, I have not given much thought to what I’ll do after graduation. Last summer, while other Harvard students spent long hours hunched over desks in Goldman Sachs, I sold train tickets to German tourists. There was, I convinced myself, a winsome kind of virtue in my refusal (well, inability) to start climbing the rungs of the career ladder.

Recently, though, my search for a career has taken on a new urgency. I am almost twenty and almost halfway through college. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up—and I’m almost a grown-up.

Concerned, I paid a visit to the Office of Career Services, where I acquired a copy of The HARVARD GUIDE to CAREERS. While the guide provided some comforting advice (“Many undergraduates assume that they must select their career field before they can select a concentration. This is not true.”), it seemed to have been written for someone far more driven than I. “By reading the Wall Street Journal or other trade or professional publications with a pen and pad close by, you can jot down the names of interesting companies or organizations almost without thinking,” the GUIDE advised helpfully. This seemed improbable.

Altough I imagine few Harvard students’ career searches have been quite as harrowing as mine has been (and I happen to believe that grocery bagging isn’t even a career, strictly speaking), in this uncertain economy concern about postgraduate plans seems to be nearly universal. Dining hall conversations revolve around summer internships; house résume workshops are thronged with anxious would-be investment bankers. We half-expect—and many of our parents fully expect—that we will find lucrative employment upon graduation, but the plum jobs that seemed our due in the early 1990s are disappearing. During last October’s Career Week, the Office of Career Services’ recruiting director Judy E. Murray was blunt about graduating seniors’ prospects: “If they think it’s the economy of two years ago, when the jobs were jumping off the shelves, they’re wrong.”

It is not only Harvard students, of course, who are grappling with a changing job market; an October New York Times article noted that law school applications had climbed 17.4 percent from 2001 to 2002, swelled by throngs of students unable to find employment after graduating from college. Law school’s appeal is obvious: like the fondly remembered investment banking and consulting jobs of the 1990s, law seems like a quick way to six-figure salaries, swank city apartments and imported cars that so gracefully accessorize a Harvard diploma.

The six-figure-salary-swank-apartment-imported-car version of post-Harvard-graduation life is seductive; part of me deeply envies my classmates who, reading the Wall Street Journal with pens in hand, are poised to embrace it. I wish I were poised to embrace something. Under the heading “Living With Indecision,” the OCS’ guide reminds the aimless among us, “Keep in mind that you are not looking for the perfect lifetime job….There is no ‘wrong’ first job if you learn something from the experience.”

Coming from a publication that earlier advised us to become “career entrepreneurs,” these platitudes are less than convincing—and not quite enough to reconcile me to taking a job as a mime. A stint as a sex columnist, on the other hand, is looking increasingly promising. Last night, I discovered the puppeteer-grocery-bagger position.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.