When I was in high school, I used to believe that college was the end-all. I thought that if you achieved enough, ticker-tape would fall from the sky and you would win at life, with Happiness guaranteed forever.
Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case. Every round of accomplishments only brings more to do, new challenges to overcome. The trick, I realized, is not to reach that magic level where this cycle stops: the trick is to live so that this is a good thing. And so I began living for happiness with a lowercase "h."
Despite this, I cannot help myself: faced with a major life choice, I devote everything I have to analyzing every option. So, like every senior without a set path into finance, law, medicine or graduate school, my impending graduation sent me into a frenzy of doing exactly that. It often seems like your job after college is the last big life choice you make, and that after that your life just fast-forwards until the mid- life crisis. Unfortunately, this also happens to be exactly what everyone above the age of 35 describes as having happened to their lives. I spent the second semester of my junior year convinced that if I made the wrong choice now, I would wake up one day in my thirties or forties and realize that I had not been happy for years.
However, my summer spent in New York opened my eyes. I was surrounded by people who seemed to embody every aspect of my potential future. My roommates, also college grads, were in their late twenties and were working in retail, part-time in one case, and would skip work to spend their days at the beach with their boyfriends and their nights out at wine bars in the city. They would wash their clothes using cold water only, and each paycheck would put a $20 bill in a piggy bank for emergency medical expenses. My co-worker at my boutique consulting firm was 26 and getting married in the fall, and was already living in a house in New Jersey. I met MIT students working for investment banks who said they worked 80 hours a week, often took a cab home from work at 3 a.m., fell asleep and were woken up by the cab driver, only to head straight back to work by 9 a.m. Another friend was working a similar (although less strenuous) schedule, but for a nonprofit organization working to expand public health care in Nigeria.
I wanted to ask each person, "Was it worth it? Are you happy?"
The problem, of course, is that people are incomparable. If the person working in investment banking is happy and the one working for a nonprofit is unhappy, that still would mean nothing, because neither of those people is me. A workaholic might be happy in either job. And certain professions always insist that their jobs are awful — lawyers and professors come to mind. Most electricians I have met told me they love their jobs. But how much of this happiness is attributable to personality and disposition, rather than actual benefits?
My breakthrough came when I went to Brown's annual networking dinner in New York, which is filled with Brown grads in all fields who are anywhere from five to 25 years out of college. "I felt like graduating college was the finish line, the big test," said one of the alumni, who went from waiting tables while trying to break into the movie business in California to being a successful entertainment executive, "but it's not." One college grad in his later twenties, who had spent his time since graduation trying to start up his own nonprofit and was thinking of going back for his Master's, told me, "People say life is short, but it's actually pretty long. You have plenty of time to drift around and try different career paths." Another Brown alum, who had gone from being half of a two-person journalism nonprofit to getting her Master's in business and working for a major consulting firm, told me that she did not regret anything — that, if she had to do it all over again, she would both work for the nonprofit all those years and switch career tracks in the end.
The more I look into applications, the more I see exactly this. The majority of law students have at least two years of post-graduate experience, in any field; you can apply for a Fulbright to study for a master's abroad at almost any time. So many of the people I met were both happy with where they had been and where they were now, even when those two places were completely different. I realized in New York that what these people were trying to tell me was that this is your life and there is no finish line — there's always change and opportunity, and the pursuit of happiness with a lowercase "h."
Michelle Uhrick '11 is graduating in May and doesn't regret anything. She can be reached at michelle_uhrick (at) brown.edu
