When I was in high school, I had one goal and one goal only: To go to Brown. Sometimes the 15 percent acceptance rate was daunting, but overall, things were simple. I might have chosen a path that required hard work but I had direction. All I had to do was to keep from straying and I was set.
Once I did get into Brown, I felt strangely empty because even though I looked forward to coming to school, I had no goal to replace this long-standing ambition. Life after college was a giant question mark and for the first time since about 6th grade, I felt aimless.
Parents may say, "follow your dreams." But that statement almost always needs to be qualified to "follow your dreams, as long as they are profitable."
How profitable? Well, first of all, they probably want you to be employed, which is not always a certainty if you want to be an actor, for instance. Furthermore, they would most likely prefer that you have job security.
Besides parents, we look to friends for advice. In my case though, the number of my friends who are pre-law, pre-med or pre-business unnerves me. When I checked the Class of 2003 Outcome Report, I found that of the 754 students who responded, 43 students were going on to law school and 44 students were going on to medical school. Thus, medical and law students made up approximately 11.5 percent of the 754 students that took the survey.
Part of me is jealous of people who chose to take a road that is adorned with plenty of markers telling them what comes next. They can keep moving forward. The road may be bumpy at times but that seems like a small price to pay for the knowledge that there will be solid footing underneath them when they go to take their next step.
But there are 98 standard concentrations at Brown in addition to the option of crafting one's own concentration. Instead of wading into these waters, it seems as if many people seek out a floating trail of stepping stones that they can leap to, from one to the next: graduating magna cum laude, getting a job at Goldman Sachs and so on.
The problem with this choice is that you bypass the real experience. This path reduces each achievement to another notch on the belt. What you are learning, how you are growing and whether or not you love what you do all recede into the background, eclipsed.
It is dangerous to expect that your happiness will flow from external sources. What others think provides very little sustenance to live off of in the long-term. So do not spend your life waiting for outside validation to define you: the medical school acceptance, the six-figure salary, the promotion to being a full-time partner at a law firm, whatever it may be. All of these things can be withdrawn in a moment; they are not integrated into the very fibers of your being.
I do have to take into account that those students whose families cannot support them after college do not have the safety net that those whose families can support them are provided with. However, what everybody at Brown does have is access to a world-class education.
For many people in the world, the necessity of mere survival impedes any chance of getting an education or seeking employment in an area that they enjoy. But for us, that is not the case.
I picture my great-grandfather moving to the United States from Italy, and the anxiety he must have felt in trying to find any job that would allow him to make a decent living. Being uneducated and unable to speak the language fluently, he had no control over his career. The job market controlled his destiny, and told him to which venture he would dedicate precious years of his life. Now, we are put in a position where we are empowered to make our own choices about what our lives' work will be. The great irony is that we tend to relinquish this enormous privilege so quickly for certainty, falling prey to careers that others want to see us in or careers that assure us of distinction.
Our education is not simply a conduit to financial success or societal prestige, but it gives us an advantage that would be inconceivable to my great-grandfather. It gives us the freedom to be stationed, completely and uncompromisingly, at the helm of our own lives. Do not be too quick to forsake that opportunity.
Lindsay Heck '07 is buying a Miata.
