The search for a career

When I arrived at Princeton four years ago, I took President Tilghman's annual opening remarks to heart: The worth of a Princeton education cannot be measured by your income, resultant connections, job title or social status. A Princeton education is about exploring the mind, challenging long-held assumptions and beliefs and exposing yourself to the problems of the world you never knew existed.

Sounds good, right?

That's what I thought, until the spring term of my senior year rolled around, and it was time to face a simple, hard fact:

I needed a job.

Was this lofty, intellectual stuff going to pay off? Were the hours I've spent drudging through Plato and sitting through lectures on the teleological influence of Hegel on Marxism transferable in today's highly specialized, technical economy?

To be sure, these are not the worries for the roughly 20 percent of students who are engineers. If they decide to apply for a job at Microsoft or Intel, they will be well-prepared. Nor do I imagine that they are the concerns of the estimated 40 percent of Princeton graduates that will enter the financial industry. Many of my friends who will be working on Wall Street could care less about whether what they learned in POL 210 will help them give sound advice on 401(k)s. Anyway, corporations like Bain and Company, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse offer intensive training programs for new employees.

But for the rest of us still on the job hunt, the connection between our present and future is less clear. According to career services, the options are endless. Their website helps you navigate through the working world, providing internet links to yearlong stints at the Turner Entertainment Networks T3 Training Program, the Institute of Southern Jewish Life Two-Year Education Fellowship and the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia HIVCorps.

But what if we are not interested in "taking the year off" — as career services classifies such options — and want to begin our careers immediately after graduation? Granted, any reasonable undergraduate understands that plans change frequently, and a career rarely ends where it begins.

It is too often assumed that if Princeton undergraduates are not applying for investment banking jobs, Teach for America or the myriad of available scholarships, they will enter the willowy world of semi-important jobs as they "find their way." That "way," of course, is usually law school. While career services necessarily operates under these assumptions, they also unnecessarily perpetuate them.

Career services should understand that many students do want to begin a real career immediately after graduation and that it may not be in finance. Career services offers options like working for publishing houses, magazines or startup companies but does not aggressively promote them as they do investment banking or yearlong fellowships. Granted, smaller and less profitable organizations, like publishing houses and nonprofit organizations, cannot spend the same amount of money on recruiting as large investment banks do. But career services could step in and provide initial funding to build stronger networks and establish a name students will respect. The occasional alum who come to campus once a term to panel "Magazines 101" is not enough.

On the flip side, we students could also do more to explore the world beyond Teach for America, Goldman Sachs and the Rhodes Scholarship. Too many of us think the only path that we can take is one where we will graduate, bumble around for a couple of years, learn some important life lesson, then smarten up and apply to grad school. While there is nothing wrong with this — in fact, a recent story in The New York Times conveyed that such a path is quite marketable — it shouldn't be seen as the "obvious" option. Many of us came to Princeton thinking that we would major in one field but ended up in another. There is no reason why we cannot challenge our preconceptions again as we enter the working world.

No one is saying it's easy, and sometimes we could use a little encouragement. For my share, I recently talked to one of my professors who sounded a similar note to Tilghman's. He said that while a Princeton education may not imbue you with the practical skills necessary for any particular job, it prepares you to be a scholar — someone who "thinks critically," makes arguments based on "rational evidence" and has an "inquisitive mind."

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Great, I thought. Again, I felt inspired. But I couldn't help wondering, would those scholarly habits of mind get me a job? And would career services help me find it? Eric Herschthal is a history major from Boca Raton, Fla. He can be reached at eherscht@princeton.edu.