The Restart Option

Those who know me well will be surprised, and perhaps alarmed, that I am writing about anything remotely technological. As a young parent, it was I, rather than my child, who found the picture book “What Makes it Go, What Makes it Float?” revelatory. Younger staff frequently come to my rescue to perform upgrades, convert documents, synch my Sprint Treo, or print outsized spread sheets.

 Some of my technology shortcomings arise no doubt due to the date of my birth. When I went to college I was outfitted with a state-of-the-art Smith Corona Silent Super typewriter. It was light green and came in a hard tan carrying case. I would never have thought to call it a manual typewriter because, of course, all typewriters were manual, right? Thus when I took a typing test for my first job and was confronted with a typewriter where all of the keys were stuck, it took a stunned HR person to introduce me to the on/off switch on my first electric typewriter.

It was a full 20 years after my first job that I met my first word processor and understood that that term referred to a machine, not a person who was an editor. The first time someone yelled “the server is down,” I was terrified that some unknown staff assistant had been felled. I have experienced the horror of seeing a multi-page document scroll up at a rapid pace, deleting every sentence along the way. And I have many times been forced to use “Force Quit” when confronted with a frozen screen. A capable user now, I fully acknowledge that I am menu-driven at the desk as well as in a restaurant. 

More importantly, however, I have learned to fully embrace the Restart option in my life. The power to begin again, to start afresh, is underappreciated as a life skill and it is one I hope that our graduates will come to approach with appreciation rather than apprehension. Successfully restarting through career and personal shifts and upheavals is life-affirming. And, as with the computer, restarting does not always mean starting out entirely anew. There have always been the equivalent of earlier drafts or saved messages—in other words, past experiences—to provide a base.

My move to Harvard in 1996 to become the Assistant Dean for Public Service and Director of Phillips Brooks House was a restart for public service at the university. To some staff and many students it appeared that Dean Lewis was choosing a force quit option when, in reality, the forced change was a chance to reinvigorate how and where our students participated in service opportunities.

Certainly, the move was also a personal career restart. It might have seemed a somewhat obvious next step for me, coming directly as I did from City Year, a youth service organization founded in Boston that was the model for President Clinton’s Americorps program. My position at City Year was already a personal and deliberate restart for myself, which I had taken after six years managing contributions for a bank and an additional two years raising funds and guiding donors at the Boston Foundation. I had craved a way to make a bigger impact on social problems and to be more hands-on in creating a new way for young people and adults to connect with the issues facing the community.

There didn’t seem to be a path within the established organizations to make this impact, so I leapt out of the predictable world of banks and community foundations to work with a fledging entrepreneurial youth service organization that was always on the brink of insolvency. In my three and a half years at City Year, we grew from one site to six, from a leaky and cold donated wharf office to a renovated center city space, from an independent privately funded start-up to a member of Americorps, receiving over half of our funds from the federal government.

The growth for me was equally vast. I learned Apple Computers, local area networks, email, venture capital, diversity training, thinking outside the box on a daily basis and much, much more. Most importantly, I learned how valuable it is to be forced—or to force oneself—to rethink old assumptions. Certainly, I had never thought of myself as being “entrepreneurial” or a “risk taker,” but putting those labels aside freed me to effect real change.

Perhaps I was lucky in that I started out post-graduate life free of a clear path. I graduated from college in 1963, the year that Betty Friedan fired the shot heard around the world and ignited the Feminist Movement—at least in my white, middle class, college-educated world. It is hard for students today to understand how momentous it was to read The Feminine Mystique: how staggering it was to grasp that the path I imagined when I entered college was far too limited. My subsequent path, therefore, was always built upon conflicting expectations about what women in general, and what I in particular, could or should do. In hindsight, this turmoil was very liberating. Because I did not have a sense of my professional opportunities, and society was confused about what was appropriate for women, I was free to find my interests, take odd paths, even sit it out for a while.

The class of 2009 has just such an opportunity. Many of you held assumptions about next steps after graduation that no longer seem viable. Some will need to take what may seem like a detour but which could ultimately become a welcome new path. If there is one wish I have for this year’s graduates, it is that they see this fiscal crisis as a freeing moment in which, since professional expectations are low, they are free to create and imagine a life that does not have a name or an established path. Our society needs many of you, even if at first reluctantly, to look outside established career paths and seek ways to grow while helping our communities and our nation confront serious issues of poverty and prejudice.

This season I will be restarting with you. I will retire from Harvard at the end of August, and share your feelings—sadness at leaving mixed with excitement and nervousness in thinking about what lies ahead. Good luck to you all!


Judith H. Kidd is the Associate Dean of Harvard College for Student Life and Activities.