Hello,
Tuesday marked the first day of classes at my university. With it, comes a new year of hopes, dreams, disappointments, and achievements. I am more than halfway done with college (this is my third year) and closer to ending college than starting it. In math terms, I am over 88% done with my educational career.
That sentence is scary, as I can no longer hide from the realities of the adult world in the ignorance of childhood. As much as I hope to leave the land of all nighters and stressful exams for the promised land of a fixed schedule and my own income, I know I will miss college tremendously not long after walking across that stage.
Given I still have two long years ahead of me, I am not yet out of the woods. But my fears of life after college are slightly dampened by my summer in Israel, which gave me a glimpse of the adult world, and how to survive it.
This summer was the first time I had a strict 9 to 5 schedule, which I initially was uncertain of. In college, my work varies with the time of year. I may have nothing to do on one Tuesday night, but may need to stay late in the library the very next one. With this summer came a great deal of time spent on Israeli public transit, and a lot of money spent on overpriced food, but with it came a fixed, and often unchanging schedule. For once, I did not have to worry about how much studying or homework I would need to do when considering attending an event. I could reliably call all the hours after 6 p.m. mine and mine alone. Getting to my hostel at the end of the day, I knew I had a city full of opportunities waiting before me. That small victory is incredibly satisfying. It is human nature to enjoy predicability, and I am only human.
I will admit that being in the same desk all day was a little dreary. I tried breaking it up by taking walks during my lunch break and exploring the limited culinary diversity of suburban Israel. I thoroughly enjoyed people watching at the food court in the mall next to my office, because if you had replaced the Hebrew with English, it resembled any suburban American mall.
I am not naive enough to think that I would also not find myself staying late at the office some nights, mimicking college days. Or that the structured life may become monotonous. Or my time and energy would be occupied at my most efficient times (generally early morning), delegating side projects to the less productive evening hours. But for the brief two months I lived an “adult” schedule, I enjoyed it. As the school year begins, I hope to replicate the reliability of the adult schedule, limiting school to certain hours and prioritizing my side projects.
I was initially fearful that the language barrier would preclude me making friends at the office. I was fearful that I would go to work, stay at my desk without speaking to anyone but my manager and then heading home. After my first week, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that everyone spoke excellent English. In fact, the company had a sales team of a dozen Americans who had immigrated to Israel. Furthermore, the office played soccer together on Sundays and after beating expectations they had of me (“we thought you wouldn’t be that good”), I became friends with a few of the dev team members. I ended up going to lunch with them, and learning some Hebrew words.
Amongst the very limited Hebrew I’ve managed to pick up, I’ve also learned to appreciate the casual nature of Israeli business culture. I wore sandals my last two weeks in the office, and I never wore a button down. In fact, I often wore shorts. My supervisors spent very little time putting me through trainings or meetings with HR, or giving me probationary work before trusting me with real assignments. I was thrown in without much formal structure or training. And I loved it. The informality gave me room to work in a way that’s most effective for me, and the resulting ownership from the control motivated me to go above and beyond.
Though, I understand how the attitude could get annoying. Some of my colleagues didn’t receive their internship placements until mere weeks before touching down at Ben Gurion airport. Some workplaces offered such little formal structure that interns didn’t have any work to do! On our first all program trip, we didn’t learn about the itinerary for the day until it was half over. We had just left the Baha’i Gardens and thought we were heading to our hostel to rest before shabbat began. But then our counselors said we would go the beach in Haifa for two hours. But other than that, I find it refreshing. A view I hold of corporate America is its need to quantify, analyze, and plan everything. Whether this is true or not I am unsure. But if it is, I feel the U.S. could learn from our ally in the Middle East.
Moving away from the commercial to the personal level, observing this attitude in action has helped me be okay with uncertainty (because there were a lot of times where I, and I’m pretty sure everyone around me, had no idea what was going on). There are many things we can not control in our daily life, and instead of focusing on them, we must focus on what we can control. This view is not unique to Israeli culture by any means. The philosophical tradition of stoicism advocates something similar to this, and there is a Christian prayer embodying this, which I am fond of despite not being Christian. Written by an American, Reinhold Niebuhr, it goes something like this:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
As thousands of ambitious university students begin applying for and hearing back from their dream firms, law schools, med schools, and more, I strive to keep that message with me. In a few days, I will announce my goals for the semester in hopes that public promises will keep me honest, but until then, I end on that message. Have a safe weekend.