In a lecture on career and calling as part of a Baylor summer program in Washington D.C., George Mason University psychology professor Lauren Kuykendall stressed to the undergraduates in the audience the limits of introspection in discerning future paths for their lives. It turns out that gaining self-knowledge is a lot more difficult than we think, and figuring out career and calling is more a matter of trial and error, and learning from others, than it is just looking inside ourselves.
There's a lot of concern about today's youth. Much of it has to do with what might be called the failure to launch, a sense that today's youth are taking a lot longer to become independent adults.
The situation is far from being all bad. Psychologists like Jean Twenge note that the concern with safety among youth has led to a decline in alcohol abuse and car accidents. Far from being lazy, teenagers often have challenging academic schedules, with many advanced placement courses and year-round participation in athletics.
High-achieving students are often put on a treadmill of meeting an external set of demands that appear arbitrary, with activities that are often heavily monitored by parents.
College is often thought of as a time of freedom for exploration and for experimentation of possible career paths. Yet for many it does not work out that way.
Ironically, students are focused on the self in ways that can cause anxiety and distract them from activities that actually help foster identity. Today's college students can be skeptical about collective wisdom, assuming that it flows from alienating power structures. There's a further irony here, in that many of the same students submit themselves to the collective voices of their community through social media and reputation management.
Young people are not unaware of the problem. There is an increase in the social acceptance of disengaging, which is seen as a solution to mental health problems. But that often offers only short-term relief; it's a retreat, rather than a movement outward and forward.
Being thrown back on themselves raises the stakes for each decision, as if each test or interview were an all-or-nothing gambit.
Baylor's D.C. programs combine academic seminars with intensive internships and a great deal of interaction with Baylor alumni working in the nation's capital. For some of our students, coming from small Southern towns, simply being in D.C. for a sustained period pulls them out of any previous comfort zone.
We put before our students a host of alumni, all quite successful, but almost all with stories of significant failure. Almost all describe their paths to their current positions as full of surprises, missteps and unanticipated opportunities. The implication? No one decision is all-or-nothing and you can't figure it all out in advance.
At their best, internships help students discern what it is they might want to do after graduation, or (what is almost as helpful) what it is they definitely don't want to do. Internships vary in quality, but especially in D.C., which can be as ruthless as its reputation, they require students to meet certain professional standards and to put up with indifferent bosses and snarky co-workers.
The advice they receive from Baylor alumni is often blunt: develop social skills, don't be the intern everyone is talking about, socialize with a filter, be willing to help but don't overpromise. They offer more than salutary warnings. They urge them to develop friend groups that transcend work, to be people known for being true to their word, and to cultivate a deep life of faith that is not reducible to success or politics.
Whether they know it or not (and most don't), they are about to make a transition from a world in which they have enormous resources and little responsibility to one in which the demands are great and the resources, few. What we do in D.C. is to try to make students aware of the resources — academic and professional training, internships and a generous alumni community — and to encourage them to move beyond themselves, beyond the limits of introspection, to challenges that while daunting can be the sources of flourishing lives.
Thomas S. Hibbs is a philosophy professor at Baylor University. Mollie Moore is the director of programming at Baylor in Washington. They wrote this for The Dallas Morning News.