Sarah Moran (The Beacon)
By Sarah Moran & Daniel Boettcher, Guest Commentary
This is a time of year filled with endless questions: What are you doing after graduation? Do you have a job yet?
These questions come with a host of underlying meanings: Are you going to use your degree? Will you be making money? Will you be in some volunteer program? To put it more blatantly: Will you be successful? But we think it is important to ask, what is success?
In these last days, we (Daniel and Sarah) have been thinking about these questions. Sarah went to the Teaching Job Fair and considered moving to Alaska. Daniel has been discerning between teaching and working with youth in some other capacity. We also recently attended and participated in Founder's Day and gratefully went to the scholarship luncheon.
Lately, we've been struck by the paradigm that success is having done incredible things in college, getting a teaching job and either radically changing the world or making a fair amount of money. For example, during the scholarship luncheon we saw a moving video about several students (some are friends of ours) and their various achievements and commitments to the University. They have done wonderful things and we hope that you don't hear a critique of them and their actions. However, we felt uncomfortable with the narrative that the University chose to tell. We heard: "These students have been incredibly successful because of the tangible change they have produced and their dedication to the University."
While it is certainly apparent that these students achieved much during their years on The Bluff, we would like to question the University's emphasis on conventional and tangible measures of success. It is easy to hear the message: Your success is measured by the grandiosity of your actions. Again this brings us back to our frustration with the common definition of success. Am I only successful if I get a teaching job (because Daniel's not)? Or only if I teach in a prestigious school (because Sarah's not)? Or even, am I only successful if I am a world changer in a radical sense?
We want to propose a different definition of success. We understand that in a materialistic, capitalist culture it is only logical to extend the product-oriented value system. If the market is paramount, then the product (our actions) has value. Yet this makes us uneasy. We would like to offer a humbler approach to success. Maybe success is how honestly you love the friend, the stranger and the enemy. Maybe your compassion matters more than any award you receive. But it is impossible to quantify love and self-sacrifice.
Our institutions will always fail us in this regard. We propose that value isn't what we produce, but how we enter into everyday living. So now we ask you, should our definition of success be rising above the average, or should it be to humble our hearts as we live into our hurts, joys, the mundane and extraordinary? But let us enter these softly.
Sarah Moran is a senior education major. She can be contacted at moran12@up.edu.
Daniel Boettcher is a senior education major. He can be contacted at boettche12@up.edu.
Daniel Boettcher (The Beacon)
