Jeff Greenwald | Remeasuring success

I sat staring at the computer in my guidance counselor's office. As soon as the clock hit the top of the hour, I think it was 5 p.m., I entered my information into the Penn admissions site and waited for the decision to pop up on the screen. But time after time the site crashed, and so for an hour and a half my heart rose and sunk.

My life, my future hung in the balance, but the Internet refused to cooperate. Eventually, the site worked and a little bear holding balloons popped up on the screen with a message next to it congratulating me on my acceptance to Penn.

I was ecstatic, although a little disturbed by the bear. I was a success, and it said so right there on the screen.

I could see everything laid out in front of me. I would go to Penn in eight months, work on the newspaper, get a great education, then skip journalism school and go right to work at a newspaper. By 22, I would be on track for the Pulitzer and from there on it would be smooth sailing.

Most of the pipe dream worked out.

I went to Penn eight months later; I kind of had to considering I applied early decision. I joined the DP the moment I stepped onto campus and worked my way up to executive editor. I picked up a degree in economics and then added one in English. Then I started applying for jobs on Wall Street and in consulting.

Yeah, that sounds weird to me now too.

Somewhere between that day in my guidance counselor's office and this fall I decided that I should go make as much money as I could after graduation. I had never spent much time in New York, much less on a trading floor or in a consulting office.

But there I was in my pinstriped suit and blue tie talking to men and women in their thirties and forties who were trying to siphon enough information from me in thirty minutes to decide if I would be more or less successful than the other 20-plus people they would see that day.

I don't know why I did that, I had no intention of accepting those jobs, or at least that is what I like to tell myself now. Maybe I'm so competitive that I wanted to prove to all the Wharton snots that I could get a $100K a year job too. Maybe I had succeeded in convincing myself that the interviews were good experience. Maybe I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I just followed the pack.

I knew that I was no longer solely focused on journalism, but that wasn't the problem and that is not what makes me angry at myself now. The real problem was not that I didn't know what I wanted to do, it's that I didn't know how I wanted to lead my life.

It has become cliche that as students leave high school they receive the time-honored spiel that in college they will discover their passions and find the course that will lead them to success in whatever field they choose.

But recently I have had to reevaluate my measures of success, and I have come to the realization that everyone has a personal yardstick in their own units of measure.

Some will find that success is directly correlated with the amount of money they make. It's simple and selfish, but at least those people know how to measure themselves. I think that's why the banking world is so enticing. The measure of success seems so easy, even though I know that for most people in banking success is much more complicated than just money.

For the rest of us - which really is everyone, even most of the Wall Street types - success is harder to gauge, and it can be maddening since we really never know where we stand. It can be measured by the quality of family life, the joy of going to work everyday, helping others, prestige, fame or all of the above.

The problem for me is that I don't know how to measure my success, which I have somehow managed to translate into my happiness. I know it's more than just succeeding in my career, but I have no idea what else is in the formula. I feel like I am going through a midlife crisis and I am not even 22 years old yet.

So in three weeks I will pack my car with as many of my belongings as I can fit and hit the road for Baton Rouge, La. where I will give two years of my life to teaching children in under-resourced public schools.

As altruistic as this all sounds, it's selfish, a way for me to find out more about myself. Maybe I'll find that helping others means nothing to me, that I would rather make a lot of money in a high-stress job. Maybe I will love the laid-back lifestyle in Baton Rouge and keep teaching there for another 50 years. Maybe this is just a pit stop on my way to becoming a prize-winning journalist.

Whatever I find in Baton Rouge, I hope it will help me figure out how I measure my success, my happiness. College only made me realize that I have no idea how to do that and that most of the time a bear with balloons won't be there to tell me.

Jeff Greenwald is a College senior from Shaker Heights, Ohio, and former executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is jbg@sas.upenn.edu.

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