The Hands You Shake

I can’t justify how late this post is. I’ll explain some projects (and a job) that caused some real delay, but much of the delay is my own fault. I’ve tinkered with this post periodically but done no concentrated work on it. I’ve been a bad blogger. Shame on me.

This post begins the week before graduation in the office of my English adviser, the wonderful Betsy Panhorst. I figured Betsy might know of job opportunities, and it turns out, she did. A retired Baptist preacher looking for a student editor had recently reached out to her. He needed basic editing on an autobiography he’d written for his family (which includes 50 grandchildren). Betsy put us in touch, and we agreed on a rate $30 per 10 pages, roughly $30/hour.

I had gotten to know Betsy fairly well while I was at Auburn. She knew I would be interested in the editing gig, and she knew, she said, the perfect person for me to contact for more stable work, Auburn’s old Director of Special Projects.
It just happened that I knew this friend of hers. She, Jay Lamar, had helped a friend and me start a student organization my freshman year. After reconnecting with Jay and sending her my resume, she invited me to Montgomery for an interview that wound up more a visit than a Q & A. Jay had left Auburn to serve as the Executive Director of the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, a government organization running educational initiatives and statewide activities to commemorate Alabama’s 200th year of statehood, ALABAMA 200.

For two months now I’ve been the Program Assistant for the commission’s Education Committee. I do whatever helps the Education Committee function. Sometimes that means organizing meetings and taking minutes, sometimes it means calling through a spreadsheet. Sometimes it’s writing press releases, sometimes it’s making supply boxes for elementary school teachers. I’ve also been put in charge of social media, which is a fun challenge. I enjoy the variety of work, and I believe enough in the cause to make stapling 400 handouts feel genuinely worthwhile. I work 40 hours per week, usually commuting four days of the week. I make a comfortable amount of money. The only downside (if it is a downside) is that I’m technically a contract worker, which means quarterly taxes.

The opportunity to work for the bicentennial came while I was still editing the preacher’s autobiography. I figured I would work a couple weeks, then discuss the two gigs in one post. Almost immediately after I started work, though, I got a call from a friend of my grandmother’s who had heard about this brilliant, writerly grandson who did fabulous work. (Thanks, Grandma.) The man who called asked if I would write six short essays for a coffee table book about active wooden churches built in Alabama before 1900. He had taken the photographs for the book when his co-author, the writer, passed away. After a little research to figure out rates, we came to an agreement. I’m now working on the second of these essays, each about how a Christian denomination entered Alabama. (More interesting than it might sound: this is back when Alabama was the frontier.)

Once this project was secured, which took some prolonged discussions with the publisher, I was ready to share. Then I got caught up in actually working on the projects and just not giving this blog attention. Those are the reasons for the lateness of this post, and those are all my updates. (Oh, and I’ve done some babysitting.)

Since it felt necessary to address the delay upfront, I’ve saved the more abstract moral-of-the-story thing for here. I’ve heard several students define collegiate success by saying “It’s not the grades you make but the hands you shake.” I used to despise this expression. First, it mistakes the purpose of education in two ways, assuming that (1) grades or (2) LinkedIn connections are true measures of success. Second, the expression’s real use is usually to console people who have made poor grades. (Someone I was once talking to used the expression after admitting they made only Ds and Cs, as if to excuse his grades.) But this is a false consolation. Third and worst of all, the handshaking mentioned in the expression always seemed dishonest. It’s using people. Not working with them, not caring about them, but seeing them only for what they can do for you. Seeing people only for their hands.

Now that I’ve graduated and found work only by way of people I know, though, I see what leads some to value handshaking so highly. Only because I’ve gotten to know Betsy, Jay, and my grandmother—(thanks, again)—have I been able to find work that’s both challenging and enjoyable. Don’t get me wrong, “It’s not the grades you make but the hands you shake” is totally still misguided; what success is really about is who you are as a person. What I’ve realized, seeing the help others have been in the past few months, is the value of knowing other people. Not hands, but people, who speak and have full lives. I’ve become more appreciative of the people I know and feel lucky to have met them. This is not mere handshaking; it’s working together.

Learning Ignorance

I know that I’m not the only one to temporarily think, as some Cornell students have written, that “the undergraduate experience has become defined by attaining a prestigious career after graduation.” My own undergrad institution, Auburn University, has a Career Center, which offers a slew of services (job fairs, practice interviews, job-search assistance, resume feedback, etc.) to help transform its unschooled freshman into top-notch prospective employees. Though I’ve benefited from many of the Career Center’s services, and though an eye toward stable adult employment probably helps people secure higher incomes, the expectation that students should graduate with impressive jobs can leave a a large number of graduates, who have likely just undergone several years of high anxiety, feeling as if they have failed. After having been sent through a gauntlet of professional preparation, it should not be surprising if graduates without well-paying, well-known employers face shame and dejection and worse anxiety than what they’ve already suffered.

Though I don’t feel shame or dejection for not graduating with a job, I know that, in a sense, I have not done what I was supposed to. I don’t feel guilty, but I know that my post-grad life deviates from what is commonly expected of it. This is, simply, the way it is, and this is the way it is for roughly 44% of college grads in their 20s.

Rather than focus on the failure—or what a totally corporatized world might call a sin—I want to describe a way that I (and I’m sure others) have been tempted to respond to it. That response is to act as if my post-grad life fits the normal course more than it does; that is, to act as if my prospects of great employment are higher than they are, or to believe I am more prepared for a particular job than I am, or to think I fulfill a specific job requirement when I actually hardly know what it means. And I’m not only talking about the temptation to pretend these when relatives ask about plans after graduation. These temptations, difficult to describe, become clear when seen in light of a figure who challenged me in many of my philosophy classes. That figure, Socrates, an ancient Greek philosopher who exists in the writings of Plato, finds himself in constant conversation with people who have fallen into temptations similar to the ones I face as a graduate without a fancy job (or job at all). These people believe that they know things they don’t—for example, the true meaning of piety and the nature of love. They genuinely (and often proudly) believe they have attained the knowledge that they are, in a sense, supposed to possess. They believe they have fulfilled the highest expectations placed on knowledge, making them, unlike your average person, successful.

Similar to the people Socrates speaks with, when I hear of certain jobs and read specific qualifications and begin to learn a new skill, I am tempted to believe that I know more than I do, that I am better prepared than I am. I am capable, like Socrates’ pals, of making myself into a painfully mistaken person, a person so mistaken he does not even know it. I—and surely other graduates—am tempted to appear as if I am closer to a stunning job than I actually am because to admit that I am a graduate with no job lined up means that, under a certain widespread expectation, I am a failure.

Now, regardless the value of the high-employment expectation (which belittles the lives and modest employment of numerous people), if I fall into the temptation to believe I am more employable than I am, I make myself into someone in need of a conversation with Socrates. The reason Socrates gets into conversations with self-deceived people is that he wants to help them. He believes that people’s ignorance is a detriment to their intellectual/spiritual well-being. But this statement is tricky. Socrates has no problem with people lacking knowledge. (Socrates, probably more than any philosopher I’ve read, admits that he does not know things.) The sort of ignorance that worries Socrates is more a temptation we fall into rather than a good old human lack of knowledge. The sort of ignorance that troubles Socrates is a refusal to admit our ignorance, the kind of refusal we might find in a dogmatic preacher or politician whose ignorance cannot be solved by merely giving him new information. The significant ignorance is the fact that even if we give these people knew information, they will refuse to accept it, find ways to dismiss it without truly addressing it. This dangerous ignorance, Socrates thought, was our ignorance (refusal to acknowledge) of our ignorance (lack of knowledge).

By claiming to know things they do not (for example, piety, love, employable skills, etc.) the people who Socrates speaks to make themselves incapable of learning the things they claim to know. We know this already. It’s the reason we call stubborn preachers, politicians, and friends unreasonable: they refuse to think, because they believe too strongly that they already know. If I fall into the temptation to believe that I am better prepared for a job than I am or that I know a skill when I do not, I make myself temporarily (fingers-crossed) incapable of becoming prepared and skilled in the ways I need to be. Worse, as NPR reports, my refusal to admit that I am not as prepared/skilled as I need to be can physically harm myself and others.

The temptation to deny my ignorance—which is here motivated by a desire to be a “successful” graduate under the high standard of impressive employment—is, unfortunately, far easier to succumb to than it is to avoid. Socrates knows that remaining aware of what one does and does not know is a daily exercise. Awareness, you might call it, is not a permanent state of mind or realization but rather one that requires continual remembrance. Just because I know now that I have very little knowledge of, say, JavaScript does not mean that when I begin to learn it I won’t get a big head. But if I can be honest about what I do not know, if I can hear the voice of Socrates forcing me to admit the hard things, I can make myself, I trust, far more than employable.

Experience

For all the claims that liberal arts degrees have little economic value, there are a number of articles bragging about the economic success of liberal arts majors (more on this in a future post). CEOs, managers, mutual-fund analysts, etc. After searching through a number of online job listing, though, I have decided that if economic success exists for liberal arts majors, especially English and philosophy, it is very well hidden. I’ve begun to look at jobs in Boston, trying to get a sense of what skills I’ll need to get an interesting job there. There are several I’m borderline qualified for:

• Consulting
• Content writing
• Communications (specifically at universities)
• Marketing
• Freelance writing jobs

And more far-fetched options:

• Technical writing
• Web Development
• Entry level programming

As far as pay goes, any of these (except some freelance jobs) should provide enough to get by in Boston.

More troubling than jobs or pay, though, are the job requirements. Some of them are modest:

• Microsoft Office, especially Excel
• HTML
• Writing samples
• Data management
• Ability to work across multiple projects and under deadlines
• All the liberal artsy skills of communication, thinking, writing, etc.

The more techy jobs require software and coding knowledge that, if I’m going to learn them, will take a while: Statistics software (SPSS, STATA), Imaging Software, SQL, JavaScript.

There are, however, two seriously daunting requirements that appear on almost every interesting job: experience and/or a master’s degree. And I’m not talking just the senior/director positions that rightly ask for several years of experience. I’m talking assistant and entry-level positions. The requested experience ranged from 1–8 years. A recent Auburn graduate and friend of mine looking for work in California has warned me of this difficulty: you can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. A marketing internship I found even required a year’s worth of previous internship experience. The insurmountable obstacle of experience has frustrated many young job-seekers, their hopelessness and apathy finding expression in a well-circulated meme:

Since we can’t all be Trump, I take it the most important job-prep I can do in Auburn is acquire experience. It’s not only about having skills but about having used them. The important question is what I want experience in. Two of my main interests in philosophy are formal logic (which borders on math and computer science) and certain other forms of what’s called analytic philosophy. My interests in these have made me genuinely curious about coding and data analysis and what it’s possible to do with them. It would be ideal, then, to find a job that would allow me to learn about these without having much training in them.

About a month ago, I thought I had landed a job like this. I interviewed for a part-time marketing position that promised to let me work on real projects, and during the interview the company’s president told me I could start the week after graduation. But it’s currently the week after graduation, and the most I have heard—after emailing and calling each week since the interview—is that, as of last Wednesday, it will be a few more weeks before I hear back. The job no longer seems so ideal, and I don’t much expect to hear from them. There are some unrelated jobs in Auburn that will pay the bills, but for now I’m going to search a bit further for something that will teach me more relevant skills.

In the meantime, I’m trying to learn HTML, CSS, and Excel, things I’m interested in that are, thankfully, marketable skills. For the HTML and CSS, I’m using codecademy.com and experimenting with what I learn to tweak the text on this blog. (As the blog develops, it might double as a set of writing samples and proof of basic web design.) For Excel, now that I’ve got time to go to the gym again, I’m playing with basic equations to tell me somewhat unnecessary things about the data I can pull from workouts and eating. Overtime, I hope to learn how to use Excel to tell me more significant things. Using the data from my life, I’ve found, makes the program more exciting to learn. As I keep learning things, I hope to get a clearer idea of what sort of job I’d like and, hopefully, become more qualified for that job.

Tip for current students: internships usually aren’t available for non-students. Take ‘em while you can.

Day One

I graduated yesterday. I stood with my fellow liberal arts students as we were conferred our bachelor degrees from Auburn University, and I walked across the stage to symbolically receive my diplomas in English literature and in philosophy. When I entered Auburn, Alabama’s oldest land-grant university, I had all the encouragement I needed to study engineering, or at least a hard science, something STEM and employable and, therefore, respectable. My first semester on the physics curriculum, I found myself restless doing physics and calculus problems, wishing instead that I was reading and writing and thinking the way that my world literature class required me to. Though I did fine in my science and math classes, my world lit class was the only one I could put my whole self into and feel whole in, like I was growing into the person I wanted to be. But I was convinced that English and philosophy were, as Forbes puts it, among The 10 Worst College Majors. In this way I met the conflict that plagues far too many choosing their college majors: do what you love or do what makes money. I believed it was impossible to earn enough money to keep myself alive without sacrificing the reading, writing, and thinking that made life livable.

When I met with an Auburn career counselor to try to resolve the conflict, I proposed majoring in engineering and writing in my free time. She looked at the results of the test I had taken to determine my “career relevant personal qualities,” parsed her lips, and told me my idea was a bad one: my test results said I was set to be a writer, a teacher, or a counselor. As an engineer, she said, I would spend about nine hours each day doing something I wouldn’t want to do. If I work five days each week and fifty weeks each year for thirty years, that adds up to 66,750 hours of my life, over seven-and-a-half straight years of doing something that already made me feel restless, unsatisfied. Did I really want that? The career counselor told me that no degree in English or philosophy would itself earn me a job, as an engineering degree probably would, but if I worked hard enough, she said, volunteered and made myself employable, I could certainly, with a liberal arts background, be successful in the real world.

I took the career counselor’s advice, and when I did, my life felt finally like my own, not something I only half-knowingly dreamed of. Despite the risk, or maybe because of the risk, I felt alive, living what people often speak of as their calling, their purpose, their truth. I spent the next four springs and four falls studying ideas and stories that were often strange and often powerful. My professors, the smartest people I’ve met, showed me how to read in new ways, to adapt my limited perspective to ideas that lay outside it, to diagnose confusions, to use words and to be used by them, to reconstruct and evaluate arguments, to sense whether a character’s emotions are believable or not, to do proofs in a formal language—that is, I learned the difficult and valuable practices that are too often lost under the vague name of “critical thinking.” I volunteered with literacy groups. I received a scholarship to study abroad. I worked part-time as a consultant at the University’s writing center. What’s more, as a student in Auburn’s top-notch Philosophy Department, I had the opportunity every Friday to join other philosophy students and our favorite professors for drinks, professors who treated students not only as mentees but as friends. My relationships with these professors offered an education that is impossible inside the classroom. So I jumped into literature and philosophy, and I came out of Auburn with two liberal arts degrees and a German minor that are just the bare surface of my college education.

But now, as a graduate, I return to the risk that nearly scared me out of doing what I wanted to: I have what Forbes calls two of the ten worst degrees, rent to pay, food to buy, and utilities to keep on. How do I feel about that? About as alive as when I first decided to major in English and philosophy. I’m fortunate enough to have heard the graduation talk of opportunity and hope without any student debt and enough savings to keep me alive for a bit, and I have become, I hope, someone who is both employable and capable of making himself more employable. What will I do? I daydream of being a writer, a data analyst, a farmer, or some hybrid of the three. How will I do it? That’s what this blog is about. I’ll be in Auburn, AL, for the next ten or so months doing things that will, I hope, keep me alive and prepare me for a far more expensive life in Boston, MA, where I am moving at the end of summer 2017. I plan to continue reading and writing while working, figuring out what exactly I want to do, and learning the skills I need to get me there. This blog will document my life after graduating from college with liberal arts degrees that, according to the study from Georgetown University that Forbes reports on, have the fourth and tenth worst unemployment and median salaries.

Though I hope to disprove that widespread whisper that says choosing a major in the College of Liberal Arts is a bad idea, my primary goal is honesty. If I end up with a satisfying, well-paying job, I hope to show how; if I have to move into my grandmother’s basement and do dishes at Golden Corral, I hope to show the struggle. I currently have zero qualms about my undergraduate education, my choice of majors and involvement on campus, and anything that might change that will have to put up a heck of a fight. I hope to record successes and failures while reflecting some on what it’s like to be in transition from a world that values self-knowledge, patient thinking, and artistic merit into a world that appears to value, before almost anything, customer bases, efficiency, and profit. Judging by my undergraduate world, my degrees are, I think, the best, most valuable degrees there are; judging by the real world that I step into today, they are thought of as two of the worst. But how much can degrees really prove? Graduation has commenced, and education cannot be returned. Time to see whether the risk of English and philosophy will bring the financial doomsday that stands between so many and the liberal arts.