“No Regrets”

I’ve been known to hold it against people when they say they have “no regrets” about anything they’ve done in their lives. While this bold sentiment is probably appropriate for young adults who don’t have enough experience to gain anything by second-guessing themselves, it is a lamentable attitude to maintain as one gets older. To have no regrets implies that one believes he/she has never made any mistakes and, worse, has not learned anything from past experience that would alter how he/she might act under similar circumstances in the future. This concept defies my ongoing belief that, as tough as it might be, people can, should, and do change as they mature. Needless to say, I have been stumbling upon some regrets milling around in my head the past couple months, and I thought I would record what I have learned from reflection. This “advice” is primarily for people in young adulthood, who are making decisions about colleges, majors, their first jobs, and maybe graduate school.

1. Follow Your Instincts: The simplest realization I have come to is something that many people intuitively grasp already and may or may not apply to everyone, and it is this: follow your instincts, especially when you are young. While some’s instincts are better than others, one thing is for certain: young adults do not have the experience to make purely “rational” decisions about major life choices and many times the best reasons for a particular choice will not become apparent until later on. I have generally held to my own advice here and have never regretted it: I chose Swarthmore College largely on my gut feeling about the prospective students I met there during “Spec Weekend”; I turned down and exotic job in Morocco a year after college because I “felt” that I needed to stay home after my mother died; and I left my wallowing in urban planning to return to City Year largely on my impulse to do something in the aftermath Hurricane Katrina. None of these decisions were whimsical and had plenty of “reasons” to back them up (financial aid at Swarthmore, a job alternative to Morocco, etc.), but they were fundamentally driven by instinctive “reasons” that could not have been fully fathomed at the time of the decision.
2. Your College Major Does Not Matter, So Do What You Want: I have come to believe that the only only impact a major at a liberal arts school like Swarthmore has on your future is to develop a lifelong passion for a particular area of knowledge. In my case, that major should have been Art/Art History, as that was the only subject in which I had an ongoing interest every semester, but because I thought I needed a more “serious” major, I went with the Honors Program in History. Though I learned how to skim and my writing improved, I could have accomplished this more easily through Art History classes in which I would have had a more sustained interest. The only other valid “reason” for selecting a major is the perceived difficulty of that major, which usually favors heavily quantitative disciplines like Math, Chemistry, or Economics. Ironically, before switching to History, I was an Art/Economics double major, which I thought would have been too “easy.” Even though I’m able to put “Honors” on my resume, I also notably don’t put my GPA, which would have been a lot better had I pursued the disciplines I really enjoyed. A year is a long time, especially when you are young, and dropping a couple of them to pursue something in which you are not really interested is not smart.
3. Do Not Go to Graduate School Without Knowing What You Are Getting Into: With my closest friends running off to prestigious grad schools, I started worrying that I was not maximizing my time/talents working at City Year. I probably wasn’t, and I still think it was time to further my education. However, Tim Burke, my favorite professor of History at Swarthmore warns against blindly jumping into graduate school. Even though he is referring to pursuing a Ph.D., his comments apply to any graduate program, and, despite having read his thoughts, I started my Master in City Planning program at Penn with very little knowledge about urban planning and the hope that I would be able to “experiment” in the field once there. Even worse, I turned down a free ride and a fellowship in Temple’s Urban Studies program, which I could have done while also continuing to work full-time at City Year. I had a number of “reasons” for choosing Penn: international scope, the quality of an “Ivy League” institution, and the design elements of the program. However, Penn did not deliver on the first two, and I did not really capitalize upon the third. (Ironically, maybe if I would have done more with the design side of urban planning if had stuck with that Art major in college…) In the end, I blew two years of my life and $200,000 in loans, lost wages, and fellowships when I could have instead “experimented” in a much more low pressure program at Temple while continuing to gain job experience at City Year.
4. Passion Supercedes Prestige, Though Both Matter: Both of the bad decisions noted above suffered from some degree of self-inflicting elitism. I felt like I wouldn’t have “maximized” my Swarthmore experience if I hadn’t done the Honors Program and, similarly, wouldn’t have had a “quality” graduate experience at anywhere other than an “Ivy League” institution. I am not saying that you should never try to pad your resume or that you should not go to an Ivy. I’m just saying those should not weigh as heavily in your decision-making as factors like your actual passions and knowledge about a particular field, because your inherent interest will ultimately lead to excellence on whatever path you choose. It does not really work the other way around: I have found it difficult to find passion when I’ve taken the prestige-maximizing path.

I cannot possibly guess what my life would have been like had I followed all the advice above and made my decisions differently. My mistakes are the only reason why I have the above advice in the first place. However, given where I am right now, I feel pretty comfortable saying that making different decisions would not have eliminated my current life from the realm of possibility while simultaneously making the road getting here a little richer and more fulfilling. I did not need a History major to feel lost after college and stumble upon City Year; I could have done that just as easily with a double-major in Art and Economics. In addition, my eventual return to City Year begs the question as to why I left in the first place. I could have stuck around for another couple years in Philadelphia, pursuing a Masters at Temple and helping to lead the Program Department. Although being able to say I “managed a $14M USAID post-tsunami reconstruction grant” probably helped to get “Executive” slapped onto my job title when I came to Louisiana, my experience at Penn and Chemonics has not actually done much for me here, and the endless work I put into this job last year would have ended me up where I am now anyway, just $200,000 richer.