I must admit that I've resigned myself to post-graduation unemployment.
After explaining, over and over, ad nauseam, the merits and downfalls of the infamous D-plan, I developed a mantra: "But, (fill in name of concerned adult here), having a summer term allows us an off-term during the year, so that it is easier for us to snag a high-powered internship and thusly prepare for a ridiculously successful career after graduation!" I would smile smugly, knowing that such an internship would give me the needed advantage to scale ruthlessly over the salivating masses of regular college students. It would get me that sweet job after graduation. And many Dartmouth students do utilize this malleable schedule to maneuver their way into these sleek jobs; every winter, hoards of the fresh-from-FSP group descend, en masse, upon New York City to partake in the Dartmouth ritual known as the "off term." They work at Arthur Andersen, J.P. Morgan, Stanley, etc., as unpaid lackeys to the corporate machine. They live with fellow Dartmouthers, work with fellow Dartmouthers, marvel at the lackadaisical nature of the drinking age enforcement with fellow Dartmouthers ... and surely, after nearly three months, they emerge, exhausted, street-smart, with their proverbial finger in the pie of corporate madness. They've got their foot in the door. They'll be ready for the caprices and rigors of a real job in the big city, working for the big firm that pays the big bucks.
Mom and Dad, understanding though they are, treated me with silence when I told them that, aw shucks, I liked Edinburgh, Scotland, so much that I wanted to, ahem, extend my fall-term FSP into the winter. Yes, I wanted to stay in Scotland and work. Silence hung heavy at the end of the trans-Atlantic connection. More silence. Fearing the price -- $3 a minute -- of extended speechlessness, I began to quickly enumerate the advantages of staying before I realized that, pragmatically, there were none. It wouldn't help me get a "good" job after graduation. I wouldn't glean any pre-professional skills that would be worthy of bold print on my strangely-barren resume. But I adored my Scottish friends, adored the city, adored the kilts and pubs and accents and fish and chips and fried Mars bars, adored the job I'd gotten bartending, and in a cliched fit of "Carpe Diem!", decided to, with or without their permission, stay.
A fellow Dartmouth student and I got a flat -- a "quaint one", replete with leaking skylight and perilously petulant "central" heating -- and eked out a living. She waitressed and worked bar. I worked bar and enjoyed an evanescent stint making sandwiches; it was not a glorious existence, and we didn't make loads of money. But we were immersed in a culture wholly different from our own, a culture we were constantly comparing and contrasting to our own, and we became fast friends with people wholly different than ones we'd ever met in the United States. Dinner parties, our tongues loose with cheap red wine, saw us listening intently to discussions of the welfare state from people who depend on the dole to make rent, to eat. Dinner parties, our tongues looser still with cheap red wine, saw us both defending and rebuking the practices of the United States, of American culture -- or, as many Scots contend, the lack thereof -- and hearing of the lives of these Europeans, who had traveled and worked and seen and lived. I was ashamed of the life, the sheltered-home-to-sheltered-university-life, I'd led. Suddenly, I felt I'd done nothing. I hadn't seen, heard, learned: I hadn't lived. I'd spent my whole life in the empty company of books, and I came to the unwelcome realization that these people, people without university degrees, people who just might spend the rest of their lives bartending, knew so much more than I. I hadn't done anything. As much as I told myself I'd accomplished, I'd done nothing.
But, as one friend adroitly reminded me: "You did this. You stayed here. That's something."
And it was. So I didn't make money. So I dipped heavily into my savings account. So I didn't augment my resume with any sparkling corporation names or jaw-dropping internships. I merely lived and worked, tried to pay rent, worried about the high price of food, and, most importantly, met people whose views and opinions angered me and inspired me, experienced simultaneous disgust and awe because I was American. For once, I was not protected from real life, from the poor, indigent, the uneducated, the people who spend their paychecks on lager and cigarettes. I learned more about myself -- and about others -- in those three months then I had in my entire Dartmouth career. I know many might regard my term, which held so much promise, as "wasted." I developed a shocking affinity for techno, watched as Scottish-isms surreptitiously crept into my vocabulary, and learned the names of the football clubs. I had broken away, and in this new, slightly scary and intimidating environment, I had really learned about myself. And though I may not be able to fit that pithily onto my resume, I will never regret my three months bartending in a foreign country -- only that I waited so long to take a chance.
