Why “What Should Matter To Me?” Really Matters

Why does the question, “What should matter to me?” matter to young alumni as they start to think about their careers? My first response is that career trajectories are nowhere as linear or logical as we’ve been taught to believe. I’m going to talk a bit about myself and my own professional evolution, and then I’m going to discuss an example that I believe is much more interesting than my own. But first, I want to return to this question and put it in a bit more context.

Our institution recently went through a significant overhaul of its core curriculum –what used to be called “general education.” Instead of organizing the curriculum around distribution requirements, the new curriculum ask students to explore four questions: What should matter to me? How should we live together? How can we understand the world? and What will I do?

What’s important about these questions for now is that my institution is making the connections between a liberal arts education and the actions one might take upon graduation transparently clear. And for me, as I thought about this talk, I realized that figuring out what really mattered to me — the first question — was essential to figuring out what I should do — with my life.

Flashback One: I got my BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature, but I didn’t start college knowing I wanted to study literature. In fact, I came to college with two different careers in mind — I thought I could either be a high-school French teacher or work for the CIA. (This is true — I spoke really good French in high school, and I thought that I could leverage my language skills if I became a spy.) I had drifted through a couple of different majors, and ultimately landed in English after I realized how much fun it was to read and write about works I actually understood. But when I graduated, I really had no idea how to articulate my skill set.

I was fortunate enough to find an HR person who saw that I had potential. I had come to Rockefeller University for a secretarial interview, because upon graduation I thought that what I could really do — after having written all those English papers and worked on a college daily newspaper — was type. When I came for my secretarial interview, the HR person asked me if I would consider applying for a production editor’s position. Thankfully, I went from there. So I fell into a job where I could use my skills of writing, editing, argumentation, communicating with authors, and so on. The money wasn’t bad for entry-level, I was doing something valuable (supporting scientific research), I did a little bit of everything. I was pretty quickly bored and felt like there were few avenues for advancement. But that’s what I did for the first three years out of college.

In retrospect, my hasty choice of this job — which wasn’t a bad job — is an example of why the four questions are relevant. I hadn’t really identified what mattered to me. So then the fourth question — what will I do? — came after the fact. The fact that I, quite literally, had to do something was dictating my actions. The tail was wagging the dog.

So after those three years, I became aware that I was asking myself the wrong question. I had to consider what mattered to me, and how that related to what I wanted to do. I realized I wasn’t just a good copy editor; I was someone who really loved literature, and even more, talking about literature. The course that convinced me to become an English major was a course in African American literature, and I became particularly passionate about that field. And I wasn’t just a good typist; I was someone who edited a section of a daily college newspaper for several years. That meant constant late nights, frequent rewriting, organization, training and mentoring — it was a real commitment. Unlike a number of friends, I wasn’t interested in journalism as a profession myself. But I loved the intensity, I liked the work, and I loved waking up the next morning and seeing the final product. In other words, I had a high degree of perseverance and I was committed to getting the job done right.

So in turn, this experience — having the opportunity to reflect on what really mattered to me, and what I really wanted to do, informed my decision to go to graduate school. Part of why I was bored as an editor is that wasn’t making meaningful decisions. There were many people for whom this was job was really meaningful; it was the right thing for them. But for me, it would have taken a long time to get to a place in the profession where I would have been really satisfied. (If I had stayed long enough to become an acquisitions editor, for example.) I wanted the decisions I made to be about literature, because that’s what I was passionate about. But most importantly, I wanted the decisions I was making to have value. And in my own writing and teaching, those decisions have consequences every day.

Since finishing graduate school I’ve taught at three different small liberal arts colleges, at two institutions abroad (one as a Fulbright Scholar), and I’ve had one fellowship away from my home institution. I’ve done a fair amount of scholarship, brought a number of grants to my institution, developed new programs, and advanced my institution’s strategic plan. This isn’t to brag about myself; it’s to emphasize that in my case, the cliché about having multiple careers over the course of one’s professional lifespan really is true. I’ve been an English professor the whole time, but my work as an English professor here is different from my work as an English professor at Whitman College or at Mary Washington College, where I first taught. And my work as an administrator is informed by the fact that I’ve asked what matters to me, repeatedly, over the years. For me, variety affords reflection — when we ask what matters to us, we should ask how different contexts inform what matters, what we and others can do, and how we understand the world.

What if you’re not in a job like mine, not in a job that is deliberately reflective? That’s fine, because the reflection starts with you, asking — and slouching toward an answer — of what matters to you.

My story is pretty conventional to academia in a way — I became a grad student, an English professor, and an administrator. I’m so glad I worked outside the academy; anyone who goes into the academy today should do so. And it’s not simply because I discovered that the grass is always greener. It’s because I discovered that what we need in the academy — teamwork, cooperation, collaboration, problem-solving— are things that are absolutely necessary in the non-academic working world. So I highly recommend to anyone who sees their future in academia: you need to do both.

Flashback Two: Now I want to tell a story of someone whose narrative is a little less conventional, but who started in the same place. This is someone whose story I know really well — my husband’s. For the record, I’m telling this story with permission — he thought that his own career path made a good example of why it’s important to answer those four questions.

My husband started in engineering school at Columbia because it was a clear pathway to a good job, but was disengaged, disappointed with the quality of teaching, and eventually — shortly before we met, had transferred into Columbia College (the undergraduate liberal arts branch of Columbia University). Because he transferred as a first-term junior, he had to scramble to complete requirements and ultimately graduated with a concentration in political science and substantial coursework in computer science, but was NOT a computer science major. (More on that later.) Along the way, he worked as a photographer and photo tech for the college newspaper and worked backstage for Broadway theater and TV (including the occasional gig on Sesame Street, like this episode!). He took the union exam for backstage electrics and carpentry and scored high enough that he would be offered a union slot, but had no idea when that would happen.

At his first job, he worked in a computer lab, but not as a programmer or developer — as a technical writer, helping his boss (a nurse by training!) document an extremely complex research computing environment and assisting scientists. He was exceptionally lucky in that the place was also run by someone who was a very creative thinker, one of the original creators of UNIX.

But then, his union number came up and he left the lab to work in theatre for five years. He only returned to computing when I was getting my PhD and one of us needed a conventional, and portable, job.

Through all of this, my husband was trying to reconcile the different things that mattered to him — creativity, the arts, computing, supporting the sciences, with the question of what he should do.

When we were discussing this, he reiterated to me: the more you know yourself, the questions you explore in college, the more you’ll know what you should do. He had worked for start-ups and for well-established companies outside academia. In those spaces, the technical and professional resources were high; in one of these companies, there was a lab just to play and learn. But the end game wasn’t exciting; he was doing something that was perfectly reasonable, it just didn’t matter to him.

So when we moved back to Philadelphia, he started to work for a research center, supporting scientific research whose goal is improving human life. It’s a good job, don’t get me wrong, but it has fewer resources than he would have if he’d stayed in the commercial sector. However, he’s been much more satisfied with what he’s doing, and with the overall goals of the organization. And he said that even though his liberal arts education didn’t explicitly stage those conversations, they were baked in. He’s been trained to think about what really matters, and that informed his choices about what he would do.

So what about your major? Or your grades? The short answer is: neither of us had off-the-charts grades, and we both did fine. And it’s hard to believe that when you’re struggling to find a job. But you will do fine.

My story: what I do might be writing, editing, critical reading, getting up in front of people. I’m listening to people, trying to hear what’s said and not said, trying to come up with solutions. These are skills of my liberal arts education, but they were not all acquired in the classroom OR in the major.

My partner’s story: what any person who’s been in computing for a long time, or most fields for a long time, or on the planet long enough, will tell you: it’s not about the specific skills. The computer languages you learn in college will be outmoded by the time you get your first job. The majority of what you’ll be doing is working with people.

So what might you do, as young alumni? I’d be remiss if I didn’t include some reading. There are lots of books about the value of a liberal arts education for the 21st-century workplace (you might check out George Anders’s or Richard Detweiler’s work, as a start). Frankly, though, you know this stuff already. You know — or you will know- — the value of exploring those four questions. Daniel Pink’s Drive, I think, is a great book — it’s worth reading simply to identify for yourself how you’re affected by extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation.

But what I would really recommend is having an honest conversation with yourself, or with a good interlocutor, about what you’ve learned. This, I believe, is the professional iteration of the four questions. The hard parts are figuring out what matters to you and then getting yourself into a situation (relationship, location, job, avocation) where you can do that thing some more. Those things that matter may not be related to your major, your current job, or even your current career. It’s our job as faculty and administrators to help you see how your academic experience has given you the tools to continue to ask the questions.