Your Career as a 'Do-Gooder'

Last Friday, hundreds of Harvard undergraduates flocked to the Gordon Track and Tennis Center to participate in the Harvard Career Forum. This annual event, featuring previous undergraduates recruiting present college students, is a symptom of the inescapable crisis that marks every undergraduate's college experience--the eventual job search. "What do I want to do with my life?" The question, asked absently when one is 8 or 14, becomes frighteningly real as graduation date approaches.

But why this absolute dread? Haven't students had about 22 years to prepare for their eventual profession? After all, graduation isn't a surprise. Upon entering the College, we learn the date that we will eventually (Ad Board permitting) leave. Yet when that expected date rolls around, few people have decided what career they wish to pursue.

Adolescents of many countries choose their profession at the age of 18. Assuming the decision-making skills of Americans are just as developed, we must acknowledge that seniors don't need more time. They've had more than enough.

The reason recent graduates find it difficult to choose their career is that for the past four years of their lives they have lived in isolation--in other words, they've been in college.

College is a unique environment in which all of the student's immediate concerns, food and shelter are taken cared of--his or her only responsibility is to graduate. It is no wonder that students have difficulty finding the job that satisfies them. They are almost totally isolated from the issues that affect the average working Joe.

To undergraduates the outside world seems completely distinct from the one within the university. College values intelligence, grades and ideals; the outside world values money and prestige and no integration seems to exist between the two. This mentality was illustrated beautifully in last week's Independent, whose cover featured a smiling graduate holding her diploma, whose face became a mask of horror when she turned to the real world and realized she had to find a job. Going from being a full-time student to a full-time breadwinner seems like jumping from a sauna into the Atlantic Ocean.

But things don't have to be this way. There is a way that students can acclimate themselves to the real world without having to find a term-time job--participate in community service.

If you are doubtful it is because you subscribe to the common Harvard misconception that community service is the extracurricular for future educators, sensitive do-gooders or pre-meds trying to pad their applications to graduate school. Students who already know what field they wish to enter, i.e. politics, feel their time is best served by running for Undergraduate Council. Rather than spend time with the people who public policy truly affects, undergraduates with political aspirations prefer to work with an artificial political body. Organizations like Debate Team demonstrate that students feel it is better to simulate the real thing rather than actually experience it.

This misconception is why so many seniors desperately roamed the aisles of the Career Forum last week.

Community service is the ideal means of finding one's place in society. It provides direct experience with the real world, while still allowing students to have some fun in college. If you want to be a doctor, rather than working in a lab, work for a children's outdoor program and get first-hand contact with the people to whom you will eventually be administering. If your interests lie in public policy, business or publishing, your interests are better served by knowing the people you intend to serve.

But in order for community service to be most useful, it needs to be performed conscientiously. Of the 1,000 undergraduates who perform some kind of community service, few consider the social implications of their actions. Many who participate in service programs merely go through the motions. And while Phillips Brooks House points proudly to the fact that over 1,000 Harvard students participate in the program yearly, the reason this number is so high is that the individual level of commitment is very low. Students consider PBHA programs something nice to do--the frosting on their activities rather than the substance.

Yes, sad but true. Community service is rarely a student's primary extra-curricular. Editors and writers for publications sometimes spend twelve hours a day working for their papers. The Institute of Politics and Harvard Student Agencies demand a fair number of weekly hours as well. And the average dramaturg devotes two hours daily to a theatrical production. The typical Harvard do-gooder however, rarely devotes more than one afternoon a week to social service.

It is this idea that community service is the exclusive realm of the 'do-gooder' that diminishes its prestige in student's minds. While few undergraduates intend to totally dedicate themselves to social service, almost all of students want to contribute the world in a positive way. Whether by reforming campaign finance or providing more efficient financial service than J.P Morgan, everyone hopes to find a place in the real world where their talents are useful to society. We are all 'do-gooders' in the end. The bustle of the Career Forum just makes us forget that.

Christina S. Lewis '02 is a History and Literature concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.