Defining success after graduation

Come May, another batch of college seniors will be let loose upon the world. I’ll be one of them, and I’m both thrilled and terrified.

Graduating means leaving the academic bubble — except for those going straight into grad school — and assimilating into the workforce. It also means mortgages, taxes, children and a high-paying job. A high-paying job is essential to success, or so we are led to believe.

Truth is the model of capitalism and chasing the “American Dream” is filled with pressures that bring unnecessary anxieties and self-doubts.

From a young age, we buy into the social construction of getting a degree and finding happiness in a good career. Yet these last couple of years have taught us that having a degree doesn’t equate to job security. But the dismal job market is supposedly getting better, and word on the street is there are going to be more jobs for the class of 2011 compared to last year’s graduating class.  

A current ranking of the best jobs consists of software engineers, mathematicians and a slew of careers in the health care field.

Bad news for me, I’m an English major, and I hope I don’t succumb to the English major cliché and wait tables for the rest of my life.

It’s not a career path that suggests success or wealth.

Leaving Bloomington is also a difficult reality. And yet it seems that the top-charting places to live after college are college towns themselves —   places like Boulder, Colo., and Austin, Texas.

Although, I’m more drawn to the alternative Portland, Ore., than to Washington D.C., or San Jose, Calif., where jobs are thriving and the unemployment rate is low.

I don’t want to move wherever the economy can supply me happiness. Isn’t it better to not be prescribed to a certain way of life just because society reinforces money as the most important aspect of a career?

Instead of selling my soul to some corporate job that I hate day after day, I think I’d rather be happy getting crap-to-average pay doing what I love or at least am comfortable and happy with.

Is that not what success really is about: happiness?

Being a clichéd struggling novelist who works as a barista doesn’t sound all that bad anymore, as long as I’m happy doing it. Why as a society do we attribute success with wealth when it should really be associated with living the kind of life one wants to, whether rich, middle-class or poor?

All those insecurities about being in debt and not having the perfect high-paying job stem from the faulted capitalistic ideology of the “American Dream,” or money, money, money.

So come May, I’ve chosen not to worry about these antiquated nightmares and instead have decided to define my own success.     


E-mail: mfiandt@indiana.edu