RECALLING MY SENIOR YEAR

Yesterday I got a chance to talk with a senior at the Wharton School of Business who is a Christian and is trying to decide what she wants to do next in life. She was encouraged to look me up by a mutual friend of ours, who saw similarities in our respective situations. This mutual friend of ours thought I might be of help to her, in sorting out how to be faithful and representative of Jesus in the process of choosing a vocational track. I was happy to make the connection.

Our conversation brought me back to my own senior year. As she shared – of the overwhelming tide of peers rushing into the traditional Wharton careers of IT, consulting, and investment banking, and of her own anxieties about how she could be a good steward of her business education while serving the purposes of the Kingdom of God – I couldn’t help but hear myself, circa my senior year, in her comments.

I reassured her that at the very least, one other person – me – worried their way through their senior year thinking about the very same things. I tried to help her to have perspective, that God is at work in special ways in the lives of people and groups that are in transition, and that thus even bouts of anxiety were part of that working out process.

I encouraged her to go through such a process in community (i.e. have friends who can prayerfully support you through your musings), and to have community as a criterion for where she should go next (i.e. who are you going to “do life with” during the next stage of your life), but not to necessarily equate that with having to stay with that same group after graduation (i.e. “community is important after I graduate” + “these friends are currently my community” does not equal “therefore I should stay with these friends after I graduate”).

Mostly, I tried to let her express her fears, and tried to share candidly how I felt, in retrospect, about my own senior year journey, so she had at least one other person’s experiences to look to for guidance and example. When we parted ways, she thanked me for taking the time to help her; but I too felt grateful, for our time together gave me the opportunity to reminisce about my senior year in college, and to worship God in the remembrance of His faithfulness to me in the midst of my worrying and frailty.