What Happens Next?


working lives pursuing it, followed—with a lit le bit of luck— by a comfortable, secure retirement. It almost seems like science fi ction now, or a documentary


P


about a long-vanished past. T e domestic auto industry was taking on water, but it was still afl oat. Google hadn’t been founded yet. Hardly anyone was connected to the Internet, anyway, and those who were had time to cook dinner while waiting for a photograph to download. Books were read on paper, and the only mail was delivered by the Postal Service. Only a handful of true believers insisted on eating organic food. T e sea of changes surrounding the turn of the century have upped the ante for picking a pathway, even as the cards


22 Eastern | SPRING 2013


eople get ing degrees these days confront a world that’s dramatically diff erent from the one they lived in when they started school at least 16 years ago. It was a world where most folks expected to pick a career at some point, prepare themselves for it, and spend their


seem to be shuffl ed ever faster. Academic disciplines shrink and expand, fragment and coalesce, as they struggle to remain accurate refl ections of the realities they both archive and investigate. But just as the world has never stood still, the newly


graduated have always faced a mystery. Aſt er all those years of knowing what they were supposed to do—the paper to write, the exam to take, the class to at end, the grade to achieve—they must now play a game whose rules they understand imperfectly, if at all. What does that feel like for Eastern’s most recent, or


soon to be, alumni? Where do they want to go? Where do they think they’re going? Which decisions have they made already, which have they deferred, and why? Where do they see opportunities, and how do they feel about the job Eastern did of preparing them? We asked a few of them some questions like these.


We encouraged them to be open-ended in their responses. Unlike the world they’re coming from, and just like the one they’re entering, there were no correct answers.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44