Re: Door Slamming/Question

[Neal Lerner <nlerner@acs.bu.edu>]

WARNING:  Stories without points to follow.

One of my high school friends chose not to go to college and instead 
became a printmaker's apprentice, about as practical as you can get.  
Nearly 20 years later, he's not in that field, but instead in the 
construction field, having weathered a nasty recession but now with a 
thriving business and is probably more financially "successful" than his 
peers.  Nevertheless, when I talked with Mike a few months back, he 
lamented over how much he had missed in his life, including college, by 
working his butt off for all this time.  I told him that many I knew who 
did go to college felt the same way.

Almost all of my friends have had career shifts of one sort or another 
(and isn't there a stat floating around that we all will have at least 3 
careers before where done with all that work?).  I believe I'm on career 
number three (though I don't have a full-time job yet, so I'm not sure 
this counts).  Someday I'd like to be a professional jazz musician.  I 
figure it'll happen when I've gotten a few things out of the way.

The history of public education in this country can be read as one to 
keep young people *out of* the job market for awhile, rather than prepare 
them for the job market.  That's true of mass high school education and 
the great expansion in higher education during the 1920s and 1930s.  
Nevertheless, students have always entered schooling in hopes of 
preparation for a professional career.  Quite a dilemma.  And I think 
that's what I hear in your stories of guiding someone to major in 
something that'll land them a job someday.  It's so darn hard to 
anticipate what jobs will be out there and the minute everybody does, 
those markets are saturated.  

When I was soon to graduate with my BA in English, my plan was to move to 
Boston, drive a taxi, and write fiction.  My most important criterion for 
getting a job was one where I didn't have to wear a tie.  Instead, 
through a family connection (the savior of the middle class), I ended up 
in the computer industry in Silicon Valley.  There were things I knew how 
to do, few of which seemed attached to what I learned in school, but then 
again I hadn't been paying much attention.

An assignment I often encouraged my students to do was to explore the 
fields they were interested in, to interview people who worked there and 
find out what qualities were required or what the path to getting that 
sort of job would be like.  It's a "practical" assignment, yet one that 
is intended for students to explore the social and political position of 
the jobs they desire, as well as the sources for that desire itself.  At 
this point, that seems the best I can do in terms of career advice.

	Neal Lerner
	nlerner@acs.bu.edu