Welcome to the world of opportunity. You have arrived at Princeton, one of the most prestigious and successful universities in the history of the planet. The powers that be have deemed you worthy to stay in the Orange Bubble, based on a perfectly calculated rubric of academic prowess, extracurricular involvement, familial connections and demographic appeal. Whatever attributes brought you here, I am sure you have noted many of the incredible opportunities that have been presented to you and the extraordinary authority that Princeton University will command on your resume forever.
Before these thoughts consume you, before you lose contact with the unique worlds from which you came, please listen to some meager words of advice from a junior who has come to feel very old during his past two years surrounded by the world’s future leaders.
While Princeton certainly grants you the ability to be wealthy, powerful and influential, it can also rob you of the ability not to be. I am sure that your parents and guidance counselors have said that attending a prestigious Ivy League university is a mechanism by which you can open any door to the future. While this is technically true, it is simply not the way it usually turns out. The majority of students reading this article will go into medicine, law, consulting or banking upon or shortly after graduation, but I have a very hard time believing that this reflects the actual proportion of students who have a natural affinity for these fields. Much more likely is that we experience a great deal of external and internal pressure to enter a high-powered career path.
Whatever your reason is — whether you want to make your parents proud, impress your peers at home or implicitly inform all your high school bullies that it’s the nerds who win at the end — it would behoove you to reexamine your motives, not because they are necessarily flawed, but because they may no longer be valid in light of the quickly approaching future.
One thing I have heard countless times is something along the lines of, “I’ve wanted to be a [blank] since kindergarten.” People who make this claim are perhaps those who most need to reevaluate their underlying drives. Perhaps begin by asking, “What did I really know when I was 5?” The fact that the idea of being a doctor occurred to you before you could even dress yourself is no evidence that it is something with which you should follow through. I’m not saying the contrary is true either — my point is simply that there is little correlation between your early childhood desires and what you should spend the rest of your life doing.
Before the online comment trolls malign me for somehow assuming that all people who desire high-paying jobs are mistaken or misguided, let me say that I have met countless students who are indeed passionate and genuinely interested in their future lucrative career paths — and I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors. However, I have met many more pre-med, pre-law and pre-investment bankers who are interested in their fields only due to their lack of interest in any other. For them, wealth is a default — a safe bet at a place like Princeton that guarantees affluence to those who bow to societal influence. These individuals have been conditioned to crave influence, adore capital and expect workplace dominance. Moreover, they have learned that brute effort is more valuable than introspection, and that leisure time is synonymous with wasted resources.
This may sound like a tired cliche. And it is, simply because it is so incredibly prevalent at a place like Princeton. Furthermore, there is little hope that it will never change. Many of the attributes that enable us to excel in academics — the ability to focus, ignore distractions and single-mindedly pursue recognition to the end of the earth — are the very same that prevent us from questioning our life trajectories. This type of determination, though valuable in most objective measures of success, can hurt us if we become desensitized to rational or introspective thought. We are moving too quickly and with too much momentum to look back — jetliners hurtling down the runway just before liftoff. To veer, or even hesitate, would be no less than fatal.
This column is devoted to those who will begin to feel lost over the next few months, for those whose unquestioned lifelong plans suddenly conflict with their current needs and constraints. If I can offer one piece of advice for your remaining time here, it is simply to take time and think. Procrastinate, but get off Facebook. Take a break without a TV and be bored sometimes. Take a walk, but don’t bring your iPod. You might be surprised where you end up.
David Mendelsohn is a psychology major from Rockville Centre, N.Y. He can be reached at dmendels@princeton.edu.
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