Students Must 'Taste' Work, Riesman Says

"The most precious thing for us is to discover what work tastes like," David Riesman '31, Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, said last night in the second evening lecture in the current series of Career Conferences.

"On the one hand we must listen attentively to our desire to get out of a distasteful job," Riesman explained, "but on the other hand we must give the job a chance by forming an intimate relationship with it."

College cannot prepare the student for the day-to-day jobs and the frustrations of the working world, he asserted, nor can novels about business or summer jobs, which he called "experiments in irrelevance." Perhaps the best thing that can be called from college is a liberal education which will brace the young man against "first-job shock," he continued.