What’s Your Fancy?

Established Professions vs. Laissez-faire Career Progression

“Work” makes up a pretty hefty part of the “work-life” equation. It’s true, I did the math.
There are 168 hours in a week. If you follow the doctor’s orders and sleep 8 hours a day, that leaves you with 112 conscious hours a week. Oh, the possibilities! Let’s say you work a 9 to 5, and actually leave at 5. You’re middle-of-the-road superficial so, according to TIME’s “One Day in America,” it takes you 24 minutes to groom yourself for work (more if you’re a woman; that second coat of mascara doesn’t apply itself). You spend 25 minutes commuting (34.1 minutes if you live in New York City, 20.4 minutes if you live in Anchorage, Alaska). That’s about 45 hours a week of work-centric activity. Which is— drum roll, please —a full 40 percent of the time you spend awake every week. If you work 50 hours a week, that’s 50 percent of your waking hours. Eighty-hour work weeks? That’s a whopping 71 percent.

It’s no wonder, then, that Generation Yers are concerned— panicked, even —about what career to choose. When we asked over 100 students and young professionals what their dream jobs were, we got a plethora of responses. Everything from engineer d’affaires (“it’s, uh, how you say, like a businessman engineer”) to a professional dancer; from a columnist for The New Yorker (quite a lot of those, actually; good luck with that) to the President’s Chief of Staff.

Of the people we interviewed, the least stressed Gen Yers seem to be the ones going into well-established professions (doctors, lawyers, engineers). You have a path, you have a purpose, you know that there’s a paycheck at the end of the rainbow and health care, too. Our future engineer d’affaires, for example, is Philippe, a strikingly handsome 22-year-old Parisian. He studies— you guessed it —engineering at Institut Supérieur d'Electronique de Paris (ISEP). He’s also a sales manager at Junior ISEP, a consulting company run entirely by ISEP students. Philippe appears ready to climb a possibly long, but surely fruitful, career ladder. And, thanks to Junior ISEP, he already gets to do what he wants to do in life.

In France, students choose “majors” in high school, after which they have to go to preparatory schools for even more specialization if they want to go to a Grande École— and who doesn’t like the sound of that? The French higher education system, like most in Europe, is far more specialized than the American system. But even if you’re an American studying liberal arts— unspecialized by design —you can still choose a well-traversed professional path.

Peyton, a junior at a New England liberal arts school, majored in Philosophy and sees law school as a “natural progression.” His dad is a lawyer, but he says he wants to be a lawyer despite his father’s influence: “he practiced the worst law you can practice: bankruptcy law. He was good at it, but I don’t think it was as fulfilling as he wanted it to be.” As Astri discussed in her last blog, Gen Yers seek fulfillment from their employment (and rightfully so, since they may dedicate up to 70 percent of their lives to it). Ergo, no boring bankruptcy law for Peyton. He’s looking forward to being an entertainment lawyer “without any moral conundrums, who can sleep at night and do really interesting, absorbing work with people in Hollywood and actors on Broadway.”

Unlike Phillipe and Peyton, however, a great many of our interviewees didn’t have clear career ambitions yet, and some were actively trying to avoid traditional paths. Ryan, a graduating senior at an “elite” US college, would prefer, in fact, to aggressively traverse roads much less traveled as a competitive mountain biker— his true passion. But Ryan feels others might look down on him for choosing athletics, and he wants to put his Geography degree to work as well: “I find myself struggling at times about what I should do after college versus what I want to do. And how to best match those up.”

Lucky for Ryan, he’s living in a wondrous wireless world. A few months after our interview, Ryan wrote me an email to report that he landed a job with a wind energy development company. “Aside from being fun work directly related to the Geography major, the job is mobile, so I can take it anywhere I go as long as I can get an internet connection. It's offered me the chance to travel all over the place and devote a bunch of time to training for this race season.” So it appears Ryan hit the post-grad jackpot.

Ryan's got it all. For now. The company he works for is on the verge of selling to a larger European owner, so Ryan isn’t really sure how long he'll get to keep his job. In several ways, Ryan's story exemplifies both the possibilities and the drawbacks of today's world. We are living in the information age and with that comes a delightful assortment of innovations and possibilities. But some sociologists also refer to this period as “the risk society.” In The Consequences of Modernity theorist extraordinaire Anthony Giddens argues “modernity…brings uncertainty to the very mode of existence.” A little dramatic, sure, but it rings true, doesn't it? Will my job be there next month? Will a faceless multi-national take over? How does the internet work, anyway (tubes, anyone?)?

And then there is personal uncertainty. Which for self-absorbed people like myself, is even worse. Where should I live? Does my first job matter? And, my all-time favorite: What should I really do with my life?

At the time of our interview, Catherine, one of those gorgeous hipster-chic types (damn them!), was just weeks from college graduation. Her plan? “For right now, just something that pays my rent and food and lets me live in NYC for a little, while I figure out the rest of my life.” I really hope she figures it out. If not, there’s always law school.