This week I put my efforts into interviews. I spoke in depth to two women who graduated in 2017. I will call the first Molly. Molly graduated from Bowdoin in 2017 and is currently working as an environmental consultant in Boston, where she spent her high school years.
I will call the second Camille. I decided to interview Camille after receiving an email from her subjected “Ramblings from Camille: Job Hunt.” Since graduating, Camille has taken on a monthly project and gathers the information to send out to a list of people who opted in. Recent emails have been about car maintenance, investment and diversity in math. This month’s email began with:
“I’m thinking of finding a new job. I like my job, but it’s not what I want to do forever, and obviously it would be better to be in a job so great that I would want to do forever. But what makes a job great? This month, I’m exploring what I want in a job, starting with some high ideals, then translating those ideals into concrete characteristics that I can either measure or ask about in interviews, and finally hopefully coming up with some realistic ideas of jobs I would want to apply for (Camille 2018).”
Camille double majored in Education Studies and Computer Science-Math at Brown University. She grew up in an upper-class family in Mclean, Virginia and attended high school in Washington DC. Camille’s email included what she did and didn’t like about her current job and what she was looking for in her next one. It also included what she identified as her “Idealistic Philosophy” including “My ideal job wouldn’t feel like a job,” “My ideal job would make a meaningful difference in the world” and “My ideal job would leave time and energy for other parts of my life.” Those three categories, what I will call joy from work, meaning and work-life balance, were themes that came up over and over again in my interviews.
Camille’s Current Workplace Pros and Cons
When I followed up with Camille, I wanted to find out what influenced her choice to go into software engineering and how she developed her priorities for her job hunt. Her answer, in this order, was her brother’s experience as a teacher, seeing the difference in her parents’ work-life balance, her own past job experiences, and to a lesser degree, her friends. I was surprised that she could so easily trace the things that impacted her.
One particularly interesting element of our conversation centered around the role of socioeconomic privilege in Camille’s life choices. Camille understands herself as coming from privilege. She told me that her mom ingrained in both her and her brother that the more privilege you have, the more you have to give back. The fact that her job ultimately doesn’t help people in a way she sees as meaningful is her primary issue with her current job. Camille was willing to take a pay cut to find something she felt passion for.
Molly and Camille were both clearly driven by finding purpose. Both are academically inclined and enjoyed school. They wanted to find work that challenged them and could be enjoyable in the day-to-day, but their primary concerns were that their personal ethics matched the mission of their jobs. In their rational calculations about work, neither seemed to think there was any price that could make them do work they didn’t believe in. Both greatly appreciated the work-life balance they found in their jobs.
I’m left with a handful of questions: Would Camille or Molly’s work desires be coded as entitled? Neither felt their behaviors had been perceived that way. What impact does graduating from a prestigious educational institution have on people’s perception of merit and workplace entitlement? What kinds of capital might Camille and Molly have gained that protects them from being coded as entitled? Molly mentioned the simple awareness about workplace appropriate use of phones.
And in a different vein, how on earth am I going to connect these descriptions of experience and workplace desires to the myth of entitlement?