There’s been a lot of back and forth this year about the treatment of the freshman class, some serious, some not, but at the end of the day, it’s difficult to criticize any effort a university makes to create a system of support for its students. There’s just one problem: Vanderbilt is made up of more than just freshmen.
Fifty years from now, I’ll get to tell my grandkids that our country hit a national recession right in the middle of my senior year of college, and I survived. What I won’t be able to tell them is that my university did everything they could to help me through it. There’s an epidemic of panic going through the senior class right now, a class facing hiring freezes, unprecedented grad school competition and an administration too focused on sophomore housing gripes to care.
That’s not to say there aren’t systems in place to help upperclassmen prepare for life after college, but they’re mostly disorganized, antiquated and generally inadequate. The Career Center is a well-intentioned office spread far too thin to make any sort of substantial impact. We all have advisers — some of us know them, some of us don’t. Some of them understand the process of grad school admissions and how to navigate the modern workforce, and some of them don’t. The one thing they all have in common is that advising students is second on their list of priorities.
My point is this: We need a new system. Just like the confused and unprepared freshmen currently blossoming through endless VUcept activities and Harry Potter-esque dining experiences, we upperclassmen need a more solid support base in our ventures into the real world.
We need to be better educated. Remember how incessantly high school counselors hounded us about college applications and deadlines? Grad school admissions make even less sense, are less streamlined and provide less assistance, and none of that even compares to how hard it is to find a job right out of college in this crappy economy. There is no reason, then, why we should receive less help from our current institutions in understanding what is to be expected.
We need to be better organized. Post-graduate guidance should come from one office and speak with one voice, not a slew of Facebook invites and e-mail addresses with no hint as to which are legitimate and which are just a waste of time.
Finally, it needs to be mandatory. Let’s face it — college students do what is required of them, and rarely anything more. That’s not because we’re lazy or unconcerned about our own futures, it’s because a lot is required of us. If you can force freshmen to meet with their VUcept groups, you can make me meet with someone, too. Someone who knows where I’ve been, where I want to go and what it takes for me to get there.
This may all sound like ranting from a spoiled Vandy girl who wants the world handed to her on a platter, and maybe that’s true. But I was a freshman once, and if I rely on the institution to guide me in the right direction, it’s because the institution made me that way.
Regardless, this school clearly has the resources to do phenomenal things for its students, and it’s about time it spent a little less time holding hands with those coming in and a little more giving a leg up to those of us on our way out.
—Carolyn Pippen is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. She can be reached at carolyn.m.pippen@vanderbilt.edu.
