Many of us at Dartmouth -- graduating seniors, '99s and 2000s looking for permanent employment and leave-term jobs -- are often faced with interviews, essays, applications and more. At times it can make you feel like you are in the midst of reapplying to college.
In my own job search with educational recruiting services, I have spent hours laboring over essay questions and personal statements. I know my friends applying to law schools and medical schools have done the same.
I remember very clearly when I was first applying to college four years ago. Although I applied early decision, I was not graced with an early acceptance, and so I was forced to write a handful of other essays in quite a short amount of time. Although I was unhappy (to say the least!) with my deferral from Dartmouth, I think that the process of writing those additional essay questions was actually beneficial to me.
The questions, many of them much more specific than Dartmouth's general question "Write your own essay question -- And answer it" were thought-provoking and at times tiresome. I remember sitting at my out-of-date Macintosh writing, revising and proof-reading my essays before my mother hurriedly stuffed them into envelopes, and together we whisked them off to the post office so that we could send them as certified mail. I remember that I had to do all of this in the period of about a week because we were leaving to go on vacation just a few days after my deferral arrived.
I know I wasn't the only one in this situation in my high school. There were many others scrambling to meet the last-minute deadlines, complaining about teachers who wouldn't write recommendations on such short notice and the guidance counselors whose demeanor was becoming slightly less agreeable over the course of the long week.
But in the whirlwind of frustration, anxiety and major disappointment, I still had to write my essays. Middlebury and Bowdoin and Bates still had applications to be filled out in black ink; deadlines to be met. And yet there was something about these extra applications that made me happy and calm. Amidst all the rush of the December holiday season, the choral concerts and sports awards dinners, the tree-decorating ceremonies and Chanukah songs, I clung to my computer. For Dartmouth could defer me, Middlebury could reject me, Bates could waitlist me and Bowdoin could laugh at me, but no one could ever take away the pleasure I made for myself in answering those essay questions. No one could disrupt the process of self-discovery that began as I typed the first words of the very first and very last college essay.
I realized that those essays, although at once perceived as a chore, were actually a gift. They were a gift because they forced me to think in a way that was not always granted in high school. These essays sparked imaginative thoughts that pre-calculus had not.
Now that I find that I am facing a similar journey in my pursuit of employment for next year, I am reminded of how I learned to take myself through a past stressful process.
Perhaps I am beginning to learn that my job search, similar to my college search, is not so much about my destination, but rather it too is about my journey.
