GUEST COLUMNIST: Looking at an uncertain next year

What are you doing next year? Are you going to stay in Philadelphia? I have yet to find an answer to either of these commonly asked questions. I could probably tell people what I am not going to be doing and where I am not going to be. I am not going to be working on Wall Street. I'm not going to be working anywhere where I have to work one job for more than fifty hours a week (sixty or seventy is out of the question.) I don't think I could dedicate my life to earning money by figuring out ways to make money off other people or worse yet, off other people's money. I am not going to be living in Philadelphia--though the idea of not having to move all my junk very far does hold a certain appeal. Basically, I'm flexible. I want a job (not a career for a lifetime or anything that serious) I will enjoy and feel is worthwhile and a home that I want to come home to. After many failures at fixing the margin and centering my name (how come when you get your resume perfect on the screen, you go to print and it prints something entirely different? I think it is some built in mechanism to increase the stress you are already feeling from summarizing 21 years of accomplishments on a single sheet of paper), I finally printed it out. By the time my resume was presentable, I had missed half of the recruiting but I decided to go over to Career Planning and Placement Service and see what all the fuss has been about. I got there and people were stuffing their resumes in every slot--from chemical companies to the Disney Corporation. I looked down at the four copies of my resume that I had brought and instead of just leaving, I decided that I would pretend to know exactly what I was doing. If knowing is "half the battle," then looking like you know is undoubtedly the other half. I searched up and down the drop boxes as if I knew a specific company that would be there. With a graceful and knowing thrust of the wrist, I slipped my resume into the slots for the jobs that said marketing or research, carefully avoiding all Accounting and Chemical Engineering positions. After this brief episode, I forgot all about OCRS until my roommate -- what would I do without her she's so good at this job-getting stuff -- asked me if I had gotten any interviews. Well, how should I know? No one had mentioned anything to me about giving me a job. She told me to go back to OCRS, get a password and then do something on the CPPS Web page. That all seemed like a lot of trouble, so I went to lunch at Commons instead. I came back from winter break and found two bills and a rejection letter from some company I had never heard of. This must be the result of my little excursion into the high-stress world of recruiting. At least they were kind enough to send me a letter but I'm sorry I made them waste the 32-cent postage. Though they don't want me, I didn't want them either. I was just caught up in the excitement (maybe frenzy is a better word) of it all. Well, I guess I'll have to hang up my rejection letter on the wall--I'm told it's a tradition for Whartonites and I wouldn't want to be left out of any other acts of self-torture that my fellow classmates are going through. So what am I going to do? New Orleans sounds good. I'll eat a little jambalaya, listen to a little jazz, live in a houseboat on the Mississippi and speak a little French to the folks in the bayou. Or maybe San Francisco, trolley cars are cool. Maybe I should look for a job before I pick the city. Can't be a doctor or a lawyer -- not yet anyway. I can go on and on about history or literature but I don't think anyone is going to pay to hear me chatter -- not yet anyway. I would have to go to more school for all that. Am I lacking ambition? Or, am just lacking direction? Maybe I should go back to CPPS and try again.