With minor differences in emphasis, career counselors tend to adopt a common refrain: Sell yourself.
Your applications are marketing tools; your online profile develops an image; your goal is to be “known” for something.
And the best way to sell yourself is to learn from corporate America. Build your brand.
Yet I rarely counsel my Wabash advisees to sell themselves and self-brand. I don’t find the advice useful for them. More important,
I don’t find the advice wholesome. Many students react in their gut against sullying their hard work, intellectual rigor, and scholarly achievement by ingesting this foreign substance.
Many Wabash students feel a faint anxiety and resentment whenever they’re asked, “Religion (or poetry or philosophy) major, huh? Well, what are you going to do with that?” The question, and the sardonic tone that often comes with it, assumes a gap between the student’s passion and a more “practical” way to make a living. It is easy for him, then, to become jaded in the process of writing resumes and cover letters, interviewing with organizations, networking, and taking those first steps into a profession. It’s not just that the process is boring or daunting; it seems to demand that a student make a leap from his liberal arts education to a career without building a bridge between them.
Who, after embracing the liberal arts—the education of a free person—wants to sell himself? Who wants to hear that the skills he’s paid dearly for—intellectual versatility, leadership, analytical and critical thinking, history-informed decision making, flexible communication abilities, and value-sensitivity—are inadequate for the “real world?”
Students need a bridge worth crossing from reading Sophocles in Greek to reading expense reports. And there is, in fact, a natural bridge from the liberal arts to the working world. The liberal arts can be put into practice without that sorry word “practical.” The argumentative skills developed by a liberal arts student are ideal for the working world.
So I tell my students, “Don’t make your brand; make your argument.”
Wabash students spend years making arguments. They write the lab report for a science experiment in one class and defend inductive reasoning in another. They don’t just take it for granted that Hitler was wrong; they wrangle the false premises in Mein Kampf. They practice the rigorous analysis, creative thought, and effective communication that demonstrate the great wealth of the liberal arts—of how many directions an idea can go when taken seriously and probed deeply.
From my vantage point in Career Services, I see in these skills much of what a liberal arts student needs to face his future with confidence. When done well, each selection of a thesis hones the ability to make a choice; each argument develops communication and persuasion; each paper reveals something of the person behind the idea.
So when an employer posts a job description, I tell my liberal arts students to see it as an essay prompt. Of course, the form of the “essay” is different, but the standards are the same. Language must be clean, precise, and absolutely free of mistakes. Claims must be made and defended with evidence. The conclusion must be clear up front: that this job was made for this student. Only those points most salient to the argument survive a ruthless revision process. Job candidates must respond to the job posting with their strongest possible case.
The resumes, applications, and interviews resulting from this process are specific, exciting, and memorable. Done well, they are convincing. I strive to help our guys earn their jobs based on the arguments they make.
But how do Wabash students know what arguments to make? How do they know a job was made for them? The Schroeder Center for Career Development is not a placement office. We do not tell students what slots they best fill. There is more essential work for Wabash to do.
Our imperative? To counsel freedom.
The liberal arts put into practice often leads to unconventional lives after Wabash, like 2004 graduate Michael Bricker’s prolific and eccentric excellence in urban development, architecture, and production design for films. Or consider Curt Schmitt ’81 and his decades-long journey through teaching religion and art to becoming a master woodworker, or Jeremy Bird ’00 and his path from religion major to community organizer to top-level political advisor. These men made their lives from the scratch of values, skills, challenges, and opportunities that life provides. They were able to make connections others had missed.
You’ll find similar levels of discernment and sense of purpose in Wabash men who have gone through this process to more conventional careers, whether you’re talking with entrepreneur Kelly Pfledderer ’96, attorney and civic leader David Shane ’70, or doctor, ethicist, and The Atlantic columnist Richard Gunderman ’83. Their everyday actions make the best argument for the lives they’ve made and the liberal arts education that shaped them. This is the kind of choice-making a Wabash education makes possible through its cultivation of the whole person.
These men’s lives—and those of thousands of other alumni—are templates for today’s students.
Wabash men face a Scylla and Charybdis. On one hand, the fixation on a few roles (Pre-med or pre-law? Banking or consulting?) can limit a liberal arts man to too few options, with the risk that none will work out. On the other hand, the sheer number of possibilities in a world still inventing itself can overwhelm even the most level-headed student.
Yet, like Odysseus, students must press forward. With the right questions and the opportunities to experiment, we can help students consistently get the most from the risks they must take.
“What am I going to do for a living?” becomes “What am I going to do with my life, and why?”
“What am I going to do when I grow up?” becomes “Who am I, and how will I grow?”
These liberal arts questions prompt the intensive self-examination and yearning to experiment that can result in a genuine vocation. As the theologian Frederick Buechner put it, “Vocation is where our greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need.” These passions arise from the integration of strengths, values, and self-image and are discernible for those who do the work. The liberal arts provide the training ground for discerning vocational callings.
But all good training needs practice in the world.
In the Schroeder Center we have bolstered our approach to helping students train for their futures. We now offer Strengths-Finder to give students insight into their talents and how to apply them. We’re building our Career Test Drive program to provide opportunities for students to experiment with their interests on the ground. We are also helping students coordinate their passions in unique ways through for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurial ventures by offering Schroeder-funded micro-grants, organizing the Entrepreneur Summit and IdeaSpark, and building the FORGE, a co-working community. We help students realize that stepping into the working world is another level of their Wabash education, not the negation or dilution of it.
And as a capstone, we collaborate with Associate Professor of Reli-gion Jon Baer on Wabash Callings. Here we aim to assist students
in shaping their futures through the notion of calling, with a range of secular and theological conceptions, and with the assurance of resources to help them along the way.
Callings supports non-profit internships, career test drives, a speaker series, coursework, and a novel student group, Quests and Questions, to bring the passions of Wabash men to life.
Through the Callings program Wabash students have heard Josh Tatum ’03 describe his journey to becoming a lawyer as being inspired by a willingness to seek (and follow) advice and a strong desire to live a life of purpose.
David Shane told them that “being other-directed and service-oriented is a good idea whatever you do, and whatever your calling may be.”
“You can’t fake this stuff. Interest is for amateurs; passion is for pros.”
They heard Dr. Rick Gunderman ’83 warn, “We can get so wrapped up in what we perceive as success that we no longer hear our calling.”
And when Quests and Questions students visited Curt Schmitt on an exploratory road trip through southern Indiana, he showed them the classical labyrinth as a metaphor for life’s grand exploration. They brought that back to Wabash, building a labyrinth on campus and sharing what they had learned with their peers.
The uncertainty that often accompanies a liberal arts degree can’t be patched by fixating on one role or an additional practical degree; such uncertainty is just the stuff of life. But when a Wabash man embraces his liberal arts education and the life of a free person lived with passion, he enacts his own argument. Then uncertainty can be transformed into a calling that enriches and ennobles him and the lives of those around him.
James Jeffries is Assistant Director of Career Services at Wabash, ranked sixth best career services office in the nation in the 2013 Princeton Review. Jeffries co-directs the Wabash Callings program. He earned his master’s in philosophy and is near completion of his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of creativity at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also puts his hands to use on numerous carpentry projects at his home in the country.