Today I’d like to discuss strategies for procuring gainful employment. You might perhaps object that I am, as a recruiter might scribble in the margins of my resume, “not qualified” to dispense advice on this subject. On this score you’d be right. Four years and 17 Lehrmda posts ago (1 Lehrmda post = ~85 days), I speculated that the reason I was having a hard time finding a job back home in B.C. was because nobody knew what the University of Notre Dame was over there. That might have had something to do with it, but the more important reasons were probably that (1) I had devoted almost zero attention during undergrad to acquiring legit professional experience, instead choosing to retreat into my introspective emo-shell of “why don’t I feel like I belong here?”; and (2) I had chosen to study theology. Oh, and also (3) I didn’t spend any effort senior year looking for a job. Who would have thought those would be problems?! /s

But I do have some thoughts on finding a job. Not crazily detailed ones—I have no novel advice to offer on the precise mechanics of networking or on the exact compositional structure of cover letters. You can go to The Muse for that kind of thing. But I do have something to say about the goal-focused nature of job hunting.

Obviously goals in job hunting are inevitable: you’ll have presumably identified a field that you would like to work in, perhaps a specific type of job or function you’d like to perform, as well as an acceptable salary range. This is fine, of course, and to some degree healthy. You need guideposts for your career search.

But more than focusing on goals, what I think we need to focus on are values. Perhaps this is due to the fact that most of my life goals have not really panned out as I expected (prominent examples include, “I’ll make friends in my dorm freshman year,” “I will find a full-time job in Vancouver after I graduate,” and “I will be in a stable, long-term relationship in my twenties”), but I think that goals (1) have the tendency of removing you from what’s really important, because they can be set according to expectations that, to some degree or another, are ultimately inconsequential (like, say, the prestige of the company you’d like to work for, which likely inflates the ego but not necessarily human happiness); and (2) they kind of set you up for disappointment, especially when they’re super specific. And goals are achieved largely on the basis of external success—you achieve a goal when you obtain something that exists in the outside world that you do not presently have.

Values are different. They are internal rather than external. They emerge from the core of who you are.

We know, of course, that some degree of external success is required for proper human flourishing. You need enough food, you need a roof over your head, you need some degree of material security. But the most profound level of flourishing, the deepest kind of personal fulfillment, is not an external but an internal achievement. And in order to achieve internal flourishing, you need to live in accordance with your values.

So at this stage of my life, six weeks away from finishing a Master’s program and without any job lined up yet, I have been asking myself the kind of deep questions that were a big feature of my undergraduate theology formation but not so prominent in my study of global affairs at the graduate level: Who am I, really? What do I care about? Where do my priorities lie—and do they lie in the appropriate places? Is the future I’m envisioning for myself—living in a Canadian metropolitan area (hopefully Vancouver), with a studio apartment and a decently remunerated position—consonant with my deepest self, or is it a divergence from the kind of life-on-the-edge, adventure-seeking ideal that I was attached to years ago? If so, is that a problem?

And I think these are precisely the questions I ought to be asking. Because the first step in one’s job search (big disclaimer: when one does not have to focus on immediate material necessity) should not be an identification of one’s external goals, but rather of one’s internal values. Because in the end, what makes a career less of a “how can I strategically utilize my sick days to get out of this” type of thing and more of a calling is the convergence of what you do and who you are.