Jane had everything a potential employer could want. Lots of work experience. Glowing references. Two degrees in the sciences. A brilliant interview.
But when her employers Googled her real name (it isn’t Jane), the highest-ranked pages were about a sex blog she unwisely decided to write for a brief time while at Penn.
And that, as they say, was that. She became unemployable. Eventually, she changed her name and switched coasts — it was the only thing she could do.
Jane is just one victim of a growing trend at college and beyond — our past has become permanent, ready to haunt us for the rest of our lives. All one needs is an allegation — even if it is subsequently disproven — published on the right websites, with enough incoming links, to permanently besmirch someone’s career. Whether on Wikipedia, your Facbeook profile or in the pages of The Daily Pennsylvanian, what you do and don’t do at college has now become as public as if you were an elected official.
Director of Career Services Patricia Rose treats this development with wry resignation. “The genie’s out of the bottle,” she declared. She found that “the baseline for most employers is at least a Google search,” and so students should “be smart” about the parts of their online presence that they do control.
The upshot of all of this cautionary wisdom is this: the age where college was a place where you could make mistakes — where you could learn life lessons, confident that you could move on — is over. The trouble is that just as our technological capacity for capturing more and more details of our lives in a permanent fashion have become greater, our capacity for forgiveness — for second chances, indulgence for youthful improprieties — has stayed the same.
Jane’s case is one example of this “never forget, never forgive” tendency, which looks likely to increase. A University of Michigan study found that today’s college students have less empathy for each other than ever — 40 percent lower than their counterparts in 1980 and 1990.
So have we finally reached a moment where one improvident question asked in a public forum can make one eternally unemployable (as unkind commenters said of College sophomore and Penn Democrats President Isabel Friedman, who pressed Newt Gingrich on his personal life), where one silly e-mail is enough to damn you in job interviews for a decade and where one inappropriate Facebook photo can cost you law school admission?
Will all of us with uncommon, easily Googled names be forced to change them and leave the country if we ever seek gainful employment? I fear the internet’s incapacity to forget — and our generation’s growing incapacity to forgive — may yet make it so.
We cannot stop details about ourselves from going public, nor will employers stop doing everything in their power to gather data about their potential employees — and, yes, ultimately judge them. What is needed, in much greater quantities, is patience, empathy and a willingness to forgive — even those people we never meet.
Employers should recognize the youth and irresponsibility of the college students they employ — as should we of each other — and treat the now indelible past as an education rather than a pseudo-criminal record. They would be well-served if they did because it is usually our mistakes and not our triumphs that build character best.
I have personally had the distinction of doing a number of very stupid things and had them stay on the internet (this column, for one), but looking back on them now I hesitate before wishing I had done things differently. Had I avoided those mistakes, I never would have become a better person because of them. Had I pulled that one thread — that one stupid lapse of judgment — I could unravel the tapestry of my life.
Our blunders make us what we are today, and we ought to forgive our missteps as fervently as we celebrate our triumphs, for it is out of mistakes that triumphs arise. If we can no longer forget, we ought to better forgive.
Alec Webley is a College senior and former chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is webley@theDP.com. Smart Alec appears every Thursday.
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