What I'm Thinking About

Life just got super busy at work, as the new school year begins and conscientious students come swarming in to plan their futures.  

I don't generally like generational stereotypes, although I read and pay attention to lots of them, since it is my job to understand and win the trust of college students.  I'm always testing what I read against my direct experience, and many of the things people say about millennials strike me as silly.  

But one thing that is true is that college students aren't very comfortable with uncertainty, with the total lack of structure and the enormous variety of choices that will face them when they graduate.  I think that's not unique to college students.  I think people aren't very comfortable with uncertainty, and our fear of uncertainty makes us grab after things that seem clear, even if we know they aren't what we want.  It takes a lot of bravery to persevere when you aren't sure what the answer is.  

I do think that maybe this generation of college students has had even less experience, good and bad, with spontaneity and serendipity and unstructured time.  So they are facing the uncertainty of adult life, with all its competing choices and indistinct possibilities, without a lot of experience and practice creating their own structure and goals in otherwise unstructured time.  

So I'm thinking a lot about what it is I've learned about uncertainty, and what the sources of answers are for students.  Not answers, actually.  That's probably not my job.  Courage -- what's the source of courage.  Basically, students have to face what they are unfamiliar with and probably rightfully afraid of, and they have to make thoughtful decisions even though they are afraid.  I'm thinking a little bit about what there is that I can teach about that.  

Comments

[abl]

There's some good advice out there on the internet, but she calls it "being brave" instead of "courage"

http://tinyurl.com/mrpz74
http://tinyurl.com/mqp8uo

I think confidence plays a big role. Confidence and preparation, separating brave from stupid.

It's brave to prepare yourself -- support systems in place (friends, savings?) and knowledge in hand (skills, education) -- and then take a risk. I think most of what people need to be brave is a reminder of how much they have - to realize that they are prepared to take that risk, however it may turn out. And a reminder that there's risk in taking that other path, too - or standing still. It's easy to forget what you're risking by taking the "easy" route, because it can be so full of external praise or expectation.

Oddly, perhaps, I think this is where good lawyer skills help. Being able to suss out the risk in different settings, seeing the risk of both action and inaction, and then forcing (and recognizing either route) as a decision. There's so much "act or failure to act..." in the law, it really can be a good metaphor for jumping off.

[abl]

Tell them to read this one, too, and think about who they are, and how they approach risks - and how their parts will feel about it.

It's why you must be so good at your job now. Being able to see risk now vs. risk then, to understand who they - the college graduating risk-taker is, and so forth.

http://civpro.blogs.com/civil_procedure/2005/03/15_things_i_lik.html

[Noel]

I agree that many people fear uncertainty. Regarding career decisions, when I realised 1) I could live on not very much money and 2) I could almost certainly get a job (flipping burgers if necessary) I realised there wasn't much to be afraid of.

[PG]

Noel got it. I am definitely one of those people who doesn't do well with uncertainty -- I was really anxious during my senior year after I got rejected by Teach for America, because it had completely messed up my tidy little plans: graduate, do TFA for 2 years while I took the LSAT and applied to law school, go to law school, get a legal job (preferably in academia or government). After the rejection, I didn't know what to do. I applied for a few nonprofit and governments jobs (PIRG, Bureau of Labor Statistics) and my economics of welfare reform prof nudged me into an interview with an HMO, which is the job I ended up taking, mostly because the idea of living on $18k in San Francisco in the early 2000s (the offer from BLS) was a little too scary.

But I know people who will just move to a city and enroll at a temp agency while they search for the job they really want. I am not sure what it takes to have that confidence. It seems in some cases to have something to do with having already had a variety of past experiences even before going to college.

I am working on feeling confident enough to unclench my fingers from around what I already have in order to reach for something else. That's really the hardest, because when someone cut me off, I no longer had a choice: I had to figure out my next step. If I can stay comfortable on this step... much more difficult to leave it voluntarily.