College is something most parents plan for their kids, starting from an early age. Not mine. My going to college seemed to my parents like some sort of crazy whim.
When are you going to be through with all that over there and get a job? Dad asked over the glare of the TV.
You keep going to that college and getting all snooty and no ones going to want to marry you, my mother cautioned.
But I was hooked. I couldnt imagine what my life would be like if I weren't going to school. I loved all of it, every class. But I had always aspired to be a writer, and the subject that inspired me above all was literature. Reading works written over time and around the globe papered the walls of who I was. I couldnt get enough of it. And I couldnt imagine it ever ending. I knew the goal was to get a degree, and I meticulously moved toward that end each semester. But it always felt like I'd never get there.
Working full-time, and carrying around twelve units per semester, it took me seven years to complete my bachelors degree. But I was able to include a year of study abroad, making a year in Florence the star atop my tree of education.
I didn't think about what I would do after graduation. More than any other time in my life, my college years were a time when I lived in the now. I was so caught up in the moment. But there were those who did think about where they were going.
I avoided the Business majors, as I sat on the lawn the School of Humanities shared with the School of Business. When we did find a reason to talk to each other, they invariably asked me the same question. What are you going to do with a degree in Comparative Literature? Most assumed I wanted to be a teacher. I didn't. I'm going to do whatever I want, I told them, with all the arrogance of the uncertain.
And that's what I thought. It might sound a little new agey, but I was under the influence of Joseph Campbell and believed that I should study what I loved. I was following my bliss. I am not one of those people who had my life mapped out. College was not a brick in some structure I was building. It was simply the most exciting place I'd ever been, and I wanted to taste all of it.
When graduation finally became a day on my calendar, I was very excited. As were all the people who cared about me. To them, my graduating from college had become sort of like waiting for Godot. Even the people who were supportive of my going to college had started asking, So, when are you going to be through with all that over there?
The bustle continued but took on new tasks. In addition to those final classes, my days were filled with the details of renting cap and gown, meetings with my advisor, filling out a blizzard of paperwork and waiting in ribbons of lines. One day, in a daze from waiting in a three-hour line, I stumbled into a campus meeting hall and found that I had happened on a career expo. Executives from all the top companies sat on folding chairs behind folding tables with piranha grins as the Business Majors and Computer Science candidates handed out resumes. Totally unprepared but intrigued to see what kinds of jobs these suits were passing out, I approached one of the card tables and picked up a brochure. A severe-looking woman in a blue suit looked for a moment as though she was going to snatch the brochure out of my hand and return it to her literature rack. Instead, she said to me, "Do you have a resume?"
"No, I don't," I tried to sound apologetic. "What kinds of jobs are you offering?" "We're seeking several types of candidates," she looked at me doubtfully. "Marketing, database administration, devel..." Just then, a woman about my age, but wearing a suit almost identical to the one the woman behind the table wore, handed over her resume. The corporate woman cut me off as though I'd never been there and turned to the other woman. "We're always in need of Human Resources Generalists," she said.
So, I guess you could say that career day made me look around me. I felt like I had suddenly come to the end of the academic groove I'd been traveling and looked up to see that I was surrounded on all sides by a vast plain. Graduation was just three weeks away. What was I going to do after that? Moreover, who would I be once I wasnt a student?
Graduation day came and went, and my elation gave way to panic, depression, obsessive job hunting, applications to graduate schools and foreign teaching posts, and excessive chocolate consumption. Joseph Campbell had deserted me. I was afraid that I had doomed myself to be in the typing pool forever.
Around the time I decided that no one would ever hire me to do anything besides word processing, I got an entry-level job as a technical writer, writing help desk documentation. From there, my career has meandered through many areas of the high tech field. My Comparative Literature degree has and continues to serve me in some way every day. It has taught me how to conduct research, how to approach a complicated task in an organized manner, and has opened countless surprising doors for me. But that's just the surface stuff. More than anything, my experiences in college, the classes, the books, my professors, talks on the lawn have given me the eyes I use to view my world. I cant imagine anything better than that. Joseph Campbell was right. Because of him, I am still steadfastly following my bliss.