Jacks of All Trades

Another summer, another summer job. It’s hard to untangle my emotions. I put so much effort into the job that I fear my mind can’t help but attach to it some cosmic significance—some self-satisfied feeling that what I just did must have been worth the effort, and so must have actually made me happy. Expos papers were somewhat similar.

Distinguishing the genuinely inspiring summer jobs (real prospects for happy post-Harvard employment) from the merely challenging is only complicated by the wealth of opportunity at Harvard. Inevitably, I feel bad turning down a job that dozens of other students would chop off an ear to secure. Under this sort of “you should realize how lucky you are” pressure, I feel compelled to call the post-college vocation search quits even knowing that my plum summer job may not be what I really want to do.

You can identify this same phenomenon writ large on the faces of nearly every soon-to-be-senior. There are once-budding journalists who cut their teeth this summer ignominiously covering poodle shows. There are once-grad school bound thesis researchers reconsidering their career paths after spending an entire summer feeling useless as they worked 10 hours a week on an inconclusive experiment. There are once-dedicated volunteers who found the inner-workings of a women’s shelter, or an English school in Beijing, decidedly less romantic than it’s made out to be in the glossy brochures. And there are once-aspiring bankers now leaving the halls of Citi and Morgan with hunched backs and pasty skin, wondering if summers pissed away making love to Microsoft Excel could remain bearable for the standard two-year tenure. There is uncertainty everywhere, and only a lucky few can really claim to be immune.

Those four scenarios above basically summarize my attempts at finding a purpose for my time after Harvard. Last summer, I wrote a postcard to The Crimson from Beirut. I was working for a non-profit (without a glossy brochure, to be sure) coordinating an exchange program between Middle Eastern and American college students. The summer before, I conducted experiments on the spore covering of the anthrax bacterium, finding lab work too slow-paced to really capture my interest. This past summer, I was one of those pasty i-bankers emerging squinty-eyed into the sun after a long summer spent staring at CNBC and Excel’s Visual Basic editor. And journalism? Outside of The Crimson, I’m pretty sure it’s not for me. The New York Times doesn’t have a barbecue on its roof, after all.

So there it is. Three summers, immense sums of money spent on my behalf, frequent flier miles earned, friends earned and lost, and I’m back to where I started: a jack of all trades but a master of none.

This feeling, I suspect, is the source of a good deal of the senior malaise that will begin permeating my the class of 2006 right after all of our theses are finished. With all the opportunity that we’ve been exposed to, not yet having a calling as a Harvard senior is not only guilt-inducing, it’s laughable. But it’s not uncommon. Like a Monty Hall game show magnified a thousand times, every door available to us conceals a career promising adventure, wealth and happiness. But still, most of us remain too hesitant to make a choice.

The stakes are too high. The embarrassing amounts of money that we’ve burned through at school in Cambridge should and must lead us, in the eyes of outsiders, to professional bliss, and this entitlement paralyzes us. It paralyzed me as well, until I attended a conference three weeks ago. There, a veteran of the Green Berets told my peers and me to plan to be unhappy. He said that if we had too much vested in the ideal of being happy post-college, we would only be more likely to fool ourselves into being happy instead of continually exerting ourselves to find our true places.

It’s counter-intuitive, but true, I think. Odds are, the vast majority of graduating seniors are going to be sluiced into some really nasty, unfulfilling full-time jobs. The trick is not in avoiding these jobs in the first place—that’s impossible—but in beating a hasty retreat as soon as possible. Long term, the only truly unhappy grads are those who, by fooling themselves or simply giving in, let their quests for happiness be sidetracked permanently.

After three summers of employment taste-testing, and in anticipation of many more years of the same, it may actually pay to be a jack, and not a master.

Alex Slack ‘06, an editorial executive, is a history concentrator in Leverett House. He is jealous of his friends who are sure of what they want to do post-college, and he hopes no one noticed the weird mixed metaphor in his postcard’s last sentence. Expos taught him to try to connect his titles with his conclusions.