Today is graduation day at my university. In an hour or so I will put on my gown and mortar board and go to the ceremony. It has been three years since I have marched, even though I am supposed to do so once a year -- last year my brother was getting married, and the year before my mother was ill, so I haven't been in town for a couple of years.
I was excited for my undergrad graduation and I see the same excitement in the eyes of my students. There is relief, a bit of being overwhelmed by family and the future in general, but generally they are happy to be graduating.
But what now? These students are graduating into the slowly recovering economy that has sent us into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Some of our grads are going to graduate or professional schools (including law, library school, med school, etc.). Some have jobs, others have other things going on. I don't know anyone who doesn't have some plans.
Several of our students change their jobs many times over the years since graduation. I find it really interesting to see what they are doing. I look at the updates on facebook, and am surprised at the variety of experiences they have had. But you can't really prepare someone specifically for the things that will come. I can't teach them through the tests I give and the papers they write what to do when you meet someone on a beach in Costa Rica and he says "come home with me to X country" or what you have always really wanted to do is run a business doing Y.
A legislator asked a colleague of mine "Can we afford the luxury of teaching college students the liberal arts? Shouldn't we be preparing them for the working world?" The person hearing this question responded "We can't not prepare them for the world, and the liberal arts are the best way to do that." I believe this, but I have been thinking for the last week or so what my "elevator pitch" is as to why someone should come to my university rather than to a professional program.
I actually asked some of my former students and one's response was that she learned to write here. She had gotten by before (she is a bright woman to begin with) but she learned the importance of communicating in writing and how to do it in both formal research writing and less formal settings. She learned how to present herself professionally and took advantage of all professional opportunities (the university sends lots of students to the National Conference of Undergraduate Research every year, for example, and she did that, as well as doing study abroad and two internships over the summers).
I would like to think that, while we don't train people how to use particular programs or mechanical tools, we teach them how to read directions and (in some ways more important) how to write them so that others can understand. We teach students attitudes and skills as well as knowledge. Some of my students go on to graduate programs in Art History and Archaeology (what I teach these days) but most years it is not a majority of them. But whatever they do I really would rather them be able to adjust to the changing needs of the work world, able to learn and teach and communicate whatever they do, and be curious and interested in exploring the world. A success for me is running into a former student anywhere in the world in a museum (this has happened once in Chicago and once in Paris), because that person is interested in something completely outside what he or she is doing for work, but enjoys art and seeing something new. A success for me is a former student who, years after graduating, sends me a link to a story in the arts section of the New York Times because it seemed as if it would be interesting to me. That person is still following the art scene, even if now a manager of a branch office for a national corporation. A success is a student who wants to come back for a summer lecture series our university is running because there are three art history faculty talking and that student (who was verrry ready to graduate) misses sitting in a classroom and learning about really exciting things (her words, not mine). A success is a student whose first experience abroad was part of his or her college career, yet ends up travelling extensively after graduation because suddenly the rest of the world is not as intimidating, just incredibly intriguing.
And as I look at these young men and women, who now are the age where they could be my children, walk across the stage, one by one, this afternoon, I will be worried about them, hoping that their experience here was a good one, and that they will be successful, however they would define that success. And hoping that a few of them will keep in touch and let me know what they are doing and where they are, whether it is related to anything they actually studied in university or not. I have my fingers crossed for them. I hope I have done okay by them, but now it is up to them (as in reality it has been all along).