Sarah Lawrence College Graduates Optimistic About Future

For Max Mallory, a star of the Sarah Lawrence College basketball team, being selected in the upcoming NBA draft would solve all the questions about his short-term future. But that’s not going to happen, so when he graduates from the small liberal arts school on Friday, he faces several decisions about his future.

It has become a cliché that the young generation is apathetic and impractical, yet three soon-to-be graduates from the prestigious institution remain optimistic about the future, due, in part, to their solid educational preparation.

Sarah Lawrence isn’t like other schools. There’s no SAT requirement, for one thing. Not tests, either, but students do undertake one-on-one weekly conferences with their professors. Classes are small, rarely exceeding 12 and there’s a nine-to-one student-faculty ratio.

Internships are encouraged, but not required, and as the recession grinds on, many of the school’s graduates are hanging on to internships in the hope that they lead to full-time positions. Like many liberal arts majors, several of them are balancing practical demands with more lofty artistic and altruistic aspirations. As with the new generation of college graduates, repaying loans weighs heavily on their decisions.

Studying creative writing and Spanish literature has worked out well so far for Maggie Murphy, who received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Argentina for a year. Her only worry is what to do until she leaves next March.

"I’ll probably be a waitress,” she said. "But ideally, I would get paid to travel.”

So far, so good. Beyond her experience in Argentina, a Master’s degree is on the horizon, but she’s not sure what she will study yet. Fiction is her thing, but she said,  “I’m not under any illusion that I’m going to get paid to write fiction. I do love to write. It doesn’t feel like work, so there’s the freelance option.”

Emily Krupin also loves to write, but she is exploring the other side of the business by extending her internship with a literary agency in New York City through the summer. She is applying for other jobs and aspires to be an editor. At the agency, her work with contracts sparked an interest in combining writing with film.

Krupin availed herself of gaining internship experience early and received school credit for her extracurricular activities.

She is comfortable with the changes taking place in the book world as print moves into the digital realm, and she appreciates being in the midst of a revolution.

“At first, the industry freaked out due to the drastic changes, but I’m comfortable exploring e-books," Krupin said. "The industry is looking for people who are in tune with the times.”

She is on Facebook and caught up in the world of digital communications, but Tweeting is something her bosses do, she said. Getting involved with the Internet is part of the job scene these days, although “you’d be surprised by how many young people reject that world,” she said.

“This generation expects everything to be so instantaneous and that can be a problem,” she continued. “It’s difficult to watch people get frustrated when someone is loading something from the Internet and it takes a few seconds longer than normal.”

Krupin served as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, The Phoenix, and said that Sarah Lawrence provided a well-rounded education.

“I can deal with any situation as it comes up,” she said. “I try to be optimistic about the future and adaptable.”   

Though pro ball is not an option, Mallory is keeping several options open. He works in the school’s admissions office in a paying position and will undergo training to acclimate him further. His duties have led him to become a booster of sorts for the school’s philosophy program. He, too, speaks about how he is adaptable to the ever-shifting job market.

“In this weird market, I’ve gotten the best kind of education,” he said. “It’s broad, which is good, because I would argue that narrow training in one field is more suited to graduate school or on-the-job training.”

What he learned, he said, is how to think. “It’s a less linear approach to the market as jobs are outsourced overseas,” he said. “Specific skills like writing, reading analytically, working collaboratively in groups and synthesizing a lot of information -- this is what’s valued in the job market.”

Mallory enjoys theater and made the audition rounds in the city but came to the realization that he also enjoyed working behind the scenes, so he interned at a casting agency.

“I want to be more of a mover and a shaker,” he said. “I’m passionate about theater and performance, but the reality of being an actor is not very fulfilling for the long term.”

Mallory is also interested in law and interned at the Westchester County District Attorney’s office and at small law firms in the city. Being saddled with student loans that must be repaid starting in November, “law school is probably not a fallback; it’s inevitable in the future,” he said.

So he plans to work all summer trying to build up a “nest egg” with a part-time job and a part-time internship. Law school will arrive and he’ll “bite the bullet” and work in a cubicle doing corporate law for five years or so to pay back all of his loans, but he’s not going to be happy “sitting at a desk doing contracts and mergers” for the rest of his life, so he will specialize in litigation and perhaps become a public defender, pursuing his true legal passion: juvenile rights, in particular the plight of children who are sentenced to prison without parole.

Despite living in a sheltered environment for the last four years, these graduates are impressive. For Murphy, the lack of exams and emphasis on having students take responsibility for their work has given her a strong work ethic.

“Getting a good education at Sarah Lawrence is completely what you make of it,” she said. “If you want to coast, you can, and that’s what life is like when you get out of school – you get what you put into it. I never worried about feeling prepared to succeed in the real world.”