Recruiting and Reflection

Recruiting is really an interesting process. It sucks a lot of time out of my life, but it helps me a lot as well. First of all, I need to sell, spin the job, and be positive to the recruits so I'm always thinking about the great stuff at work. I'm thinking about the World Cup, international transfers, and the culture, the good stuff. You don't describe 80 hour weeks in epic detail to the recruits. At the same time, I'm remembering where I was at that time, how excited I was to get an interview and then the job offer, and what brought me back there in the first place. It's a time to remember what I'm thankful for about the job and reminds me that at this time a lot of people don't have jobs.

Simultaneously, you're forced to really reflect. I've been asked about my ten year plan, how long I'm going to stay, and what keeps me at my current job. I'm asked about how many hours per week I'm doing, detail about my case experiences, and to synthesize my experience in larger terms than I'm used to. The usual pattern is to get lost in the details and survive week to week, but being forced to reflect in broader strokes is always an invaluable exercise. If nothing else, recruiting compels one to do so while speaking to enthusiastic soon-to-be-grads who've yet to spoil their idealism with real world, perpetual work. It's entirely different when it's not a for a finite period of time, uncomprehendingly so.

David Foster Wallace said it with amazing grace in a graduation speech he gave at Kenyon College:

"The truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what 'day in, day out' really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about."

It's hard not to be at least a little bit cynical after joining the working world-you simultaneously undergo the incredible change of working, a change most people never recover from and find soul/dream crushing, and adjusting to a whole new system (of acronyms, of customs, etc.) and corporate culture, which is hard enough on it's own. It's a far bigger change than going to college. I'd argue the biggest change in a young person's life is the post-student adjustment. Our parents become more sympathetic and heroic as we understand their plight. I understood what commuting 2 hours a day did to my dad and what a toxic corporate culture can do to the enjoyment of one's job. Youth is wasted on the young they say, and it couldn't be more appropriate. You don't realize the value of your free time and the luxury of being a student until you don't have it anymore. That's why you go BACK to school.