A job well-done should serve others, not just your ego or bank account

During a cab ride on the way to the airport for a recent summer job interview, my traveling companion and I began to discuss the dreaded subject of career possibilities. When I expressed a possible interest in teaching, the cab driver, who had been listening intently to the entire conversation, chose to join in: "If I were your father and had paid that much for your education," he retorted, "I would kill you if all you did was teach."

For my cab driver, the return on education is measured in purely financial terms. But his logic, along with the logic of many others, is clearly fallacious.

Recent Princeton graduate Emily Moore '99, who now teaches in New Jersey, wrote earlier this month in Newsweek of a similar experience. While interviewing for a summer job to supplement her teaching experience, her interviewer asked bewilderingly, "But you have such a good degree! Why waste it teaching?" For that interviewer, teaching seemed neither glamorous enough nor powerful enough to satisfy the potential of a Princeton degree. She viewed the return on education solely in terms of power and upward mobility. Her reasoning, like my cab driver's, is seriously flawed.

Of course, all of us have, at times, measured our own career options by their financial rewards, by the social networks they would create and by the power they could provide in the long run. We use these measuring sticks partly because they are tangible and concrete, and certainly they are all relevant as small parts of a broader perspective.

But at the same time — contrary to what my cab driver and Moore's interviewer would have us believe — our Princeton degree in no way obligates us to achieve any of those concrete goals. There must be some more universal criterion, under which all of the more tangible measures fit, that the potential of our education obligates us to fulfill. What, then, is this over-arching yardstick? How should we use our Princeton degree?

The answer to this question lies in our University's motto: "Princeton in the Nation's Service, and in the Service of All Nations." Today, that slogan rarely appears outside of opening ceremonies and Commencement, and we consequently put surprisingly little stock in it. But in talking to alumni, I have found that older generations of Princetonians attach considerable significance to that little truism. Why? Perhaps because the extent to which we uphold that slogan is the most honest standard by which we can measure our individual success.

For teachers, this is simple, because most are attracted to their profession at least in part by the potential for making a positive social impact on a local level. At the same time, it is difficult for teachers to bring about broader national changes, because they often lack the capital and the personal networks to do so.

Enter our more traditional criteria for success. Investment bankers, business consultants and lawyers can create change using their financial and personal influences, and by serving on community boards and civic committees. Engineers and corporate executives can do the same. Government officials can work toward the same goals from within the public sector. People with high-profile, glamourous jobs can use their public leadership roles to push social agendas. Scientific research can serve thousands. Doctors can help in two ways — by serving their patients in the immediate sense and by addressing public issues through their own connections. In short, serving the nation — and other nations — requires correlative efforts from a variety of sectors. Each career path, as a result of its immediately tangible benefits, plays a different but equally important role in the big picture.

As a result, investment bankers and consultants are not inherently "selling out" — provided they use their influence to effect broader change. Those who participate in politics are not necessarily just basking in personal glory — so long as they use their positions effectively. Teachers, foreign service workers and the like are not wasting their degrees — they are serving the nation in a more immediate sense, albeit on a smaller scale.

Financial rewards beyond what is required for comfort, social networks and power are all valid criteria for evaluating success, but not in and of themselves. These benefits are important only for the national service that they make possible, and the simplistic reasoning of my cab driver and of Moore's interviewer fails to account for this connection. The only genuine obligation that comes with our Princeton degree is to use its power to serve, and there are innumerable careers, all equally valid, that make fulfilling this obligation possible. Alex Rawson is a history major from Shaker Heights, Ohio. He can be reached at ahrawson@princeton.edu.