Tag: choice

Finding Your One Thing: Discernment in a World of Career Noise

Students often struggle to balance passion with practicality in career decisions, influenced by financial obligations and societal expectations. Many enter careers accidentally, through apathy, or via social pressure, leading to dissatisfaction. Encouraging thoughtful reflection on values and proactive choices can guide students toward fulfilling career paths aligned with their true vocations.

a woman with rope tied around her body
Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

One of the challenges for our students in making vocational and career decisions is finding the appropriate balance between passion and practicality. While the pursuit of one’s passion is often considered the ideal, the realities of modern life—with its multitude of well-meaning voices, financial obligations, and family concerns—frequently necessitate more pragmatic choices. This tension creates a dynamic in which vocational aspirations and career decisions are continuously evolving and being reconciled.

Vocation often has spiritual and philosophical connotations. And even though we often use career interchangeably with vocation and calling, there are important distinctions between these words. Careers are frequently regarded as more pragmatic and of lesser importance, with the implication that vocation, and especially calling, hold greater depth. I would contend that one’s career also merits deep reflection and discernment. Today, a career is understood as the journey or path one takes in their professional life. While vocation speaks to the inner call, career offers a different context that includes steps taken to build one’s life’s work. Our careers, although distinct from our vocations, can be the means through which we express our vocations or callings. In this context, our careers should also be the result of deep thought and discernment.

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The Anxiety of Choice

As we give students choices, we need to be present with them, too, in whatever times and ways we can.

One semester in college, I earned an A-minus in private organ lessons. That minus annoyed me: I practiced my required hours and did what I was told to do. But I’d hit a stage at which I wasn’t told what to do on a crucial point: namely, how to set the stops for a piece. I had to choose for myself: Viole or flute? Trumpet or krummhorn? I balked. Hence the minus.

Despite their predictable chafing for freedom—the freedom to make choices—students often get stuck at the same place I did. They don’t actually want to make choices; they want someone else to make choices for them. This creates an obvious problem for discerning, let alone responding to, a vocation. In this post I will suggest some common reasons that we reject freedom of choice as well as some theological and practical means for overcoming these obstacles to embrace that freedom, making vocation possible.

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Daunting Freedom, Paralyzing Fears

One of the most dramatic features of the late modern period (which to historians means anything after about 1790) is that everything about where you will live and what kind of work you will do and who you are likely to meet and marry was no longer decided by the time you were born. As the myriad changes in the technology of production collectively constituting the Industrial Revolution produced in turn momentous shifts in geographical, political and familial organization, suddenly people no longer simply inherited their place on the planet and their place and role in a community from their parents. More than two centuries downstream, we take all this for granted, but of course in the grand sweep of human experience across millennia, it’s really pretty much a recent innovation.

The good news is that, to a significant extent, if you are born in the US or Canada, in Western Europe and in increasing portions of Eastern Europe, as well as in many other arenas of relative affluence and stability around the globe, you are largely free to choose your life: where you want to live, what kind of work you want to do, whether and whom you want to marry or whether to have a family at all. In short, you can decide who and what you want to be when you grow up. (This remains true in general despite all the ways access to various life paths and indeed to freedom of choice itself is filtered and limited by economic resources, ethnicity and social class in America as elsewhere, despite our denials. Social mobility and the liberty it offers is not by any means unqualified or universal, but it is real, and historically unprecedented.)

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Help for Undecided Students

A recent article in the Chronicle describes one strategy large universities are using to help students declare a major earlier in their career. But the role of the advisor continues to be paramount in the unfolding process of discernment, decision, and direction.

I “meandered” through several majors during my college years. Such exploration was encouraged, understood as an important part of the liberal arts commitment to “breadth” and the messy and slow process of “figuring it out.” By the time the deadline for declaring a major arrived, I had completed most of the required courses for the philosophy major, taken here and there as electives. I called home and left a message on my parent’s answering machine (this was in the late 80s), notifying them of my intention to declare a major in philosophy. Beyond having to endure my father’s jokes (Q: “What did the philosophy major say to the engineering major? A: “Do you want fries with that?”), they supported me in both the meandering and the final decision.

Thinking about this now from the perspective of college personnel, I can see why such meandering might be considered a problem, for the student as well as for the institution. A recent article in the Chronicle describes one strategy that some large universities are taking to circumvent these problems: the development of the “meta-major,” requiring students in their first year (and in some cases before they arrive on campus) to commit to a general area. Such interventions appear to be necessary, given the scale of the institutions. In one example cited in the article, the ratio of advisors to undeclared students is 1:275! Readers will not be surprised to hear that the “meta-major” is part of a larger strategy to improve retention and completion, and the article mentions other measures.

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Exploring Vocation in Honors Education

It’s fair to say that most faculty are honors students. We climbed the hill of academic success, garnered several complicated degrees and certificates, sat through terrifying and difficult exams, and embarked on various research projects.

Our identities as scholars and teachers are often still conflicted, responding to the demands of a product oriented higher education landscape and the liberal arts education many of us cherish. So, too, do our students who seek academic achievement find themselves conflicted when they arrive in an honors program.

Honors programs vary in nature and scope—some emphasizing an enriched liberal arts curriculum, some prizing individual research projects and some asking students to apply research in their communities and through civic engagement. The programs attempt to add depth or breadth to student experience, as well as platforms for innovative teaching and learning. Continue reading “Exploring Vocation in Honors Education”