An Anxious April

In 43 days, I will no longer have a convenient answer to drop-down online questionnaires. The soothing action of clicking “student” will not be an option. And what will be clicked in its place is still up in the air.

Leaving college is never easy, but I suspect that only some of the fears of the senior class revolve around not having your food cooked for you in the dining hall or learning to wake up at 7 a.m. For many Harvard graduates, we will stop being students, a primary identity, one we have clung to since we were four.

By this point, cramming for exams is second nature. We know how to write essays in our sleep. We have somehow even managed to fit a full class schedule and many hours of extracurricular activity into one week and still do almost a quarter of the reading. You start to fear that you may never be able to do anything as well as you were able to do in school.

April anxiety, however, is different from that of the previous months. For those who resisted the recruiting route, the earlier part of the year was a time to be proud of the fact that you were taking a career path less traveled. But by April, you start to think about compromise. Maybe you don’t have to start on your career goals now; maybe a job, any job, will at least keep your parents from freaking out about their $160,000 investment that is not paying off. Yet maybe you will also get stuck.

With spring showers comes delusion.

Several months ago, my roommate and I decided to start a commune. In a yet-to-be-specified city, we have found the answer to sky-high rents—without salaries we surely couldn’t afford a place—we are living under a bridge wth a small killer dog to protect our laptops.

This may sound ridiculous—though we already have a list of possible tenants—but this was merely a January concoction. April brought the creation of “Fat-opia,” a business enterprise which relates highly to its name, though I don’t want to give away any trade secrets just yet.

Almost every senior I know who is still job-searching seems to be ditching the hunt and spending time on more creative pursuits. New and imaginary life goals are concocted on the fly and seem to fall into two categories—“awesome way I can get rich and basically continue to live my college life and watch movies/drink all day” or “really depressing way I’m going to end up when I’m jobless, but if I joke about it maybe it’ll make it all okay.”

Most of the ideas in the first category come from the realm of highly inappropriate things that we think might make money similar to i-banking bucks. Such as a top-of-the-line house of ill repute. Or a strip club. Or “helping” the couple of female friends you have who fit nicely the description in the egg donor ads, providing the workless team with some cash. There’s also the slightly more Hollywood idea of becoming a band of highly skilled thieves.

This is what I like to call the Never-Neverland approach. Because the one thing worse than not having a job is thinking about having a job. Gone are the days of getting up at one or wearing sweats all day or watching TV at three in the afternoon. A common variation on the above imaginings is coming up with a really awesome job that breaks the nine-to-five mold and actually exists and then plotting ways to get it.

The second category of visions of the future is initially less creative—there are only so many ways to live sans apartment. Where things get entertaining are the accommodations after you’ve made a little piece of urban space your new home. You’re jobless, destitute, and living outside, but you can bring your TV, right? Further, there’s always an opportunity for a little freelance—a best-selling memoir about your seedy life on the streets, perhaps with some James Frey-ian embellishments.

Psychologically, there’s nothing wrong with a little make-believe, or at least that’s what I’m hoping. But unless I can write a best-selling book on 500 crazy things to do with a Harvard degree, I’m probably not helping myself with the procrastination. Deep down, we know that what we do in the next few months won’t make or break our lives. And I’m pretty sure that whatever category I drop-down to on my next online questionnaire isn’t a permanent decision. Without other answers, it’s probably time to turn this April apprehension, or apathy, into April anticipation.

But if you actually strike it rich with some wacky scheme, let me know. I’ll be under my bridge with my little dog. Don’t pet him, he bites.

Margaret M. Rossman ’06 is a English concentrator in Mather House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.