Tag: oregon state university

Career Advice 2024

July 19, 2024

At Reser Stadium, Oregon State University, in Corvallis, OR, ex-OSU football player Steve Jackson delivered a commencement speech that was more than just advice. It was a call to action, a call to travel and discover oneself. The stadium was hushed as the students absorbed Jackson’s powerful message, drawn from his own transformative experiences.

 His speech resonated deeply with the audience and earned the roaring applause of the 7,600 graduating students and forty thousand family and friends in the stadium on June 15, 2024. We were in the audience to watch our grandson graduate in engineering.

Jackson started his speech by asking the students: what is your next step? The NFL drafted Jackson before graduation, and he did not have to think about the future until he became disappointed with his team and concerned about his long-term career. His concern led to travel each year when the team was off-season. This narrative structure, which began with a personal anecdote and then transitioned into the central theme of travel, effectively engaged the audience and set the tone for the rest of the speech.

He traveled alone or in small groups to meet local people in foreign countries who did not know he was a well-known football player in the US. He said his travels made him find his strengths and increased his confidence in resolving challenges when he came home. The challenges did not become any easier; they remained the same. However, he discovered that he became better at solving problems based on what he learned traveling.

He recommended travel, including adventures like he had paragliding over Iguazu Falls in Argentina and cage-diving with great white sharks.

Another adventure was to build water wells in Tanzania as part of a team to help that country with its water problems. The tour also included climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, an extremely demanding physical hike. He described that when the group climbing the mountain was a hundred meters from the top, he looked back and saw his friend struggling to walk further, weakened by the thin air at this high altitude. Although he was steps away from the top, he decided to return to help, and both scaled the summit together. Jackson said teamwork is essential in achieving goals, but helping his friend was a moment of self-discovery in understanding your strengths and empathy for others.

Listening to Jackson reminded me of my travels to the Middle East and Southeast Asia with my wife. We backpacked, taking the less traveled paths and taking advantage of learning about local cultures, being observant, and talking to people. I fully agree with Jackson; when traveling, you leave your daily routine and identity behind as much as possible and instead open your mind and eyes.

For instance, we stumbled upon the rat temple in India, where you enter barefoot and are surrounded by over 25,000 rats (Karni Mata in Rajasthan). The full-time staff’s dedication to feeding and supporting these rats is a testament to the temple’s religious significance. It was a sight we could never have imagined before our travels.

We also saw an exquisitely carved Jain temple, where we had to shed all leather goods (materials that come from living things), like my belt, to enter. Other requirements were no shoes, socks, or food, and women could not enter during their menstrual cycle.

In Moslem Jordan, we learned that all room service staff were men; women are prohibited from working in such spaces. Instead, Egyptian immigrant men are doing this work.

In Bangladesh, we encountered a combination of urban poverty, crowding, and working conditions that do not exist in North America; for example, we saw fifteen people sewing shirts in a closed, windowless space of two hundred square feet with one lamp and no AC, working in temperatures of over ninety degrees in Pune, India. We also experienced a hundred-mile, four-hour car trip.

Returning from our trips, we have become more tolerant and understanding of different cultures. We looked at our issues at home from a larger perspective; for example, we did not think our highway congestion was terrible compared to the roads around Pune.

Mind you, we traveled when we were older, unlike what Jackson recommended in his speech to new graduates. And we were not looking for our future careers. However, travel is educational at any stage in life and can help focus people’s lives, so I thought Jackson’s speech was helpful to new graduates.

But remember that young people want to get on with their careers and look for a job before considering traveling. One also needs some funds to travel. So, although I agree with the premise that travel opens your mind and assists with figuring out your career, most young people fall into the job market after graduation, often marry and establish a family before thinking about travel that needs some funds and free time. Considering these practical challenges when evaluating the relevance of Jackson’s advice is essential.

With his newly minted diploma, my grandson, Cedric, had already secured a job in San Francisco before he heard Steve Jackson. Many of his friends had also obtained jobs before graduation. However, the message may linger with them, and between future job changes, they may travel. For those graduating with no immediate plans, by all means, go on a trip and find yourself. That was Steve Jackson’s message.

How College Students Spend Summers – Then and Now

August 3, 2022

This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.

We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.

OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.

Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.

Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.

One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.

I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.

So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.

Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.

He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!

My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.

Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!

One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!

Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.

Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?