Ariel Horn: For education's sake

I have spent almost every waking moment of the past year desperately wondering what the hell I'm going do with my life.

On my existential quest for employment, no job was too small: if they were hiring, I was FedExing my resume on "vanilla oak" paper ("Eggshell" was nice too). I am convinced that I am now number one on "Stalker Lists" in human resources departments across the country.

I interviewed with a retail buyer who convinced me that "being a dust ruffle buyer for the past three years has been the most meaningful experience in [her] life." I waited on line with urban hipsters and bohemian crack-heads alike for five hours in order to audition for Broadway's Rent. I had a consulting interview in which I "logically" explained to my interviewer that there are "50 million haircutters in the United States" (yes, I know that that's roughly one-sixth of the American population, but you've really got to understand that this interviewer wouldn't give me enough time to finish my rationale).

In another consulting interview, the conversation somehow turned to talking about vibrators. (Note to those of you still looking for a job: talking about sex toys in an interview setting is a very, very bad idea.) And the crown jewel of my desperate, ego-busting, gut-wrenching, nail-biting search for employment: a conversation in which a 55-year-old advertising executive stared at me blankly when I mentioned Kofi Annan, the United Nations' secretary general, and said in genuine curiosity: "Isn't he that new purple, furry muppet on Sesame Street?"

No, I'm not making this up.

Not surprisingly, then, my search for the utopian paradise that I imagine full-time employment to be has left me with an empty, sick feeling inside -- like the way I felt on the first day of kindergarten when I realized that school was not all that it was cracked up to be: at home, the apple juice was colder, the cookies tastier, the toys cooler, and my siblings didn't bite like the little trolls in my class. For the past year, I've dreamed of the "real world" largely in the same way I dreamed of kindergarten: a paradise where I could do what I want, be who I wanted to be, achieve my dreams and assert my independence. This year, in the throes of an economic recession, to many of us, the "real world" seems like just a fictional utopia that is perpetually out of reach.

At Penn and across the country, seniors have wondered day in and day out where we're headed and how we're going to get to this ever elusive post-graduation utopia -- and with the recession, if there's even a way in for all of us.

For most of the past year, I was one of those traumatized seniors judging my own self-worth on the job offers I did or didn't get. I cried to my family on the phone about how I was an unemployable, unmarketable, untalented wretch. I was sure that happiness and meaning in my life depended on my having definitive "plans" by graduation. For the past year, I've just assumed that a job would make my post-graduation life meaningful.

But as graduation has crept closer these past couple of weeks, I've had the "cathartic moment" that I usually only write about in English seminar papers. If the interviews, stress and international crises of this past year have taught me anything, it's that meaning in life doesn't come from your first job offer out of college, how big (or small) your paycheck is, or whether or not you have a job at graduation. It doesn't come from how hip your new apartment's location is, how well your new employers wine and dine you, or the long hours you work to make your way to the top.

The irony of the end of senior year is that, inevitably, we all get so caught up with finding a job by graduation that we almost miss the point of our Penn education entirely. Jobs don't give lives meaning, and our professors at Penn haven't dedicated themselves to our education for us to leave Philadelphia thinking that. It's what we've learned at Penn as people, as students, as friends that will give our post-Penn lives meaning and purpose. It is the intellectual curiosity we've cultivated, the courage we've grown to stand up for what we believe in and the relationships in which we've learned from and loved one another that made our lives meaningful at Penn -- and will make our lives important beyond.

It is not who we are at this moment, but who we are to become.

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