Class of '04 scattered to the wind

Many graduates find ther careers in fresh ways and on their own timelines.

by Kristen Cole

Emily Taylor recently exchanged her role as a student for that of instructor, bobbing through the waters off the Chatham Yacht Club in a motorboat while teaching youngsters to use the wind to best maneuver their crafts.

With a bachelor's in biomedical ethics, a hunch that she might like to do journalism, but no experience in the field yet, Taylor decided to return after graduation to the seasonal job at the yacht club where she has worked the past seven summers.

"A lot of people ask what are you doing in the fall and 'I don't know' is not the easiest answer to give," said Taylor, of Chatham, Mass. "I needed to decompress for the summer and adjust to being out of school."

The members of the Class of 2004 have scattered all over the world, and the Office of Career Services has the arduous task of keeping tabs on its 1,489 graduates. Career Services will collect data on employment and education decisions the graduates made - first in the fall of 2004 and again in January 2005.

At the moment, the Career Services staff is tallying feedback from 135 companies and nonprofit agencies that recruited on campus this year. Based on that, the greatest percentage of jobs accepted by the graduates appear to be analyst positions, and the greatest concentration of jobs, in New York City.

Yet those statistics do not capture the entire scope of the graduates' decisions - one that includes students who are finding their careers in other ways and along their own timelines, according to Kimberly DelGizzo, associate dean of the College and director of the Career Development Center.

"It seems that Brown has a preponderance of bright, creative students who are entrepreneurial in spirit regarding their career development," said DelGizzo. "The entrepreneurial skills of crafting their academic experience go hand in hand with being proactive and engaged in the process of crafting their career development. We see that this often leads to interesting, exciting and rewarding career paths."

Some of the graduates are pursuing once-in-a-lifetime opportunities: Liz Daniels of Pennsylvania will participate in the U.S. Olympic swimming trials in mid-July; Ana Chartier of Seldovia, Ark., will volunteer for nine months in rural Nepal to teach health to school-age children.

Taylor's senior year was so busy with writing a thesis and senior events that she did not have time to think about life after Brown, she said. The night after Commencement, surrounded by the seven women with whom she lived - all members of the Class of 2004 - it hit her that this was the end of their time together, and her tears began.

One housemate decided to go to New York City for a job at J.P. Morgan, said Taylor. A second is looking for a job in the public policy arena, and a third must complete some courses before applying to medical school. Taylor's fourth housemate will study at the Parsons School of Design in New York City in the fall, while the fifth will soon be teaching culinary arts to Italians at a cooking school in that country. No. 6 is biking across country.

Housemate No. 7 was uncertain what she wanted to do after graduation, said Taylor. That graduate packed her car and left Providence with no destination in mind and wound up in Austin, Texas. "We were all standing in the driveway when she drove off," said Taylor. "We didn't know, and she didn't know, where she'd end up."

But, Taylor said, she has a few years; her father did not discover what he really wanted to do until he was 40.

"They know it doesn't come to you right after school," Taylor. "It's kind of exciting having the freedom to do whatever I want at this point ... on a day-to-day basis, I make decisions based on the wind and the weather."