Andrew Wilkins: the innocent abroad.

• Author: Wilkins, Andrew
• Position: College students

It's springtime, and as another cohort of university graduates prepares to embark from the safe-havens of its classrooms and cloistered study nooks, I think back on my own recent commencement and have for them only this advice: Stay in school.

Nothing anyone says can prepare you for how challenging your first year out of college will be. It is alternately strange, boring, humiliating, lonely, uncomfortable, infuriating, and of course, uncertain. But above all, it is a test more important than anything Organic Chemistry could throw at you. It is a test of your values--those things you spent the last four years forming in and among your peers, in discussion groups and campus organizations--and it is like nothing that has come before.

Many college students fancy themselves environmentalists. They spend their days studying trans-boundary conservation areas in Sub-Saharan Africa and agonizing over every little detail of their resource use--and getting really angry with those who neglect to do the same. Some ponder what they would need to prepare for life when--not if--civilization comes crashing down, and daydream about finding a small farm far out in the country and being as self-sufficient as possible.

When I was caught up in this, it all seemed so laborious and exasperating that I didn't see it for what it was: a great luxury. After graduation, there's little time or energy to muse over homestead living or indulge in hours of amateur impact analyses. Tuition dollars no longer pay for that privilege. Now, much of our time has to belong to someone else.

Nevertheless, we assumed perfect jobs would be waiting, jobs that would set us on a career path to perfect, unassailable ecological holiness. Jobs that were challenging but not overwhelming; absorbing but not consuming; mainstream enough to be respectable yet fringe enough to be innovative and exciting. And of course it would save the planet. And be well paying, and management-level. We had B.A.'s--no photocopying for us!

Of course, employers did not line up with such offers. (Imagine that.) I ended up doing what many graduates do these days: moving back home and trying a lot of different jobs--cheesemaker, reporter, waiter, substitute teacher. Mostly I spent a great deal of time feeling like a directionless drain on...