Vocation
Isn't A Dirty Word
by Jamienne Studley, J.D.
On Broadway Avenue Q is
packed with youngsters who laugh ruefully at songs like “What Can You Do With
a BA in English?” and “I Wish I Could Go Back
to College.” As the characters, engaging puppet/human
college graduates, search for jobs that will pay the rent,
the notion that what they are really searching for is “purpose” hits
them like a thunderbolt.
That reaction was a vivid reminder to me, a recent
college president and long-time advocate of liberal education,
that we need to be clearer about the relationship among learning,
work, and purpose. Our students want to know how to connect
their values and goals, their intellectual passions and capacities,
the myriad of learning experiences in which they engage during
college, and the work of their lives.
Too often
students are introduced to the world of work and the process
of career planning the same way they learn about sex—on
the playground from their peers. The results are often
similarly distorted, incomplete, and even risky. As with
sex, learning how to connect one's education and life's
work is best done thoughtfully and with responsible adult
involvement. It's high time for us, as educators, to think
about what that would look like in undergraduate education.
College mission statements testify to the integral
connection between liberal education and preparation for
work, leadership, and service. Lately, academia seems to
be consciously embracing the importance of integrating all
aspects of the undergraduate educational experience, including
academic, co-curricular, residential, volunteer, spiritual,
and athletic life. But even with this comprehensive vision,
the dimension of work, past, present and future, is typically
left out of the integrative model. Some institutions and
educators treat students' fascination with their future pursuits
as irrelevant, a distraction, the province of a few specialized
staff. Skilled career services staff offer self-assessment,
counseling, and other resources to help students plan outward
for career choices and job searches, and faculty are typically
happy to let them do it. The problem is that these career
development processes are not woven into students' central
educational endeavors where they could provide powerful material
and expand motivation for learning.
The goal is to broaden students' vision instead
of narrowing it. The rising enrollment in undergraduate business
degree programs is driven in large part by students' expectation
that jobs in business will be more readily available to business
majors than to others. But the best teachers, including in
the business department, tell students that it is most important
to pursue subjects to which they bring intensity, curiosity,
discipline, and a desire to learn, and that students of every
subject find rewarding work when they have done their best
and developed essential capacities.
Those
of us in midlife know that finding our vocation(s) and
meaning in our work, and linking them to our values, knowledge,
and capacities, is a lifelong challenge. Understanding
that, we should give our students a strong foundation for
conducting that process of exploration, reflection, adaptation,
and learning—and we should seize the chance
to do it as they make the critical early choices of their
college years.#
Jamienne S. Studley is the former President
of Skidmore College.