Notre Dame hosted its annual fall career fair last week. Over the course of three days, thousands of students eagerly searched for their next internship amongst the many companies arrayed on the seventh and eighth floors of Duncan Student Center.
The fall career fair offers a glimpse into the achievement culture that pervades Notre Dame’s campus. Anxious students mill about, bearing their polished resumes, hoping to one day find success in the real world. This, it seems, is an essential step to finding happiness. Without discouraging the pursuit of a career—even a prestigious or lucrative one—let us reflect for a moment on why.
College is a springboard for the rest of our lives. Therefore, as many of us search for jobs, myself included, we must interrogate our motives. How much money is enough? What is success? What is the Objective?
This final question is key. In his poem, “The Objective,” the late American author and poet Wendell Berry writes,
“Men and women, and children now pursued the objective as if nobody ever had pursued it before.
The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
The once-enslaved, the once-oppressed,
were now free to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons in pursuit of the objective.”
To Berry, the Objective is an obsession with the efficient and the comfortable. It supplants moral good with material good, and pulls us into a relentless pursuit of itself, uprooting us from our families and communities. The Objective, however, is ultimately insatiable. A life spent in pursuit of the Objective will look back on itself unfulfilled—and it will find itself no nearer to the Objective than it began.
There is more. Man’s final end leads to something real—and it is not the Objective.
Thomas Aquinas writes that man’s final end, or telos, “can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence:” spending eternity worshiping Him who created us for Himself. He continues, “man is not perfectly happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek.” (Summa Theologica, I-II, 3.8).
Augustine of Hippo wrote similarly in his Confessions. “For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”
Therefore, man’s final end cannot be wealth, prestige, or any other worldly good. Our telos is not GPA, extracurricular activities, lucrative careers, or any other accomplishment. None of these satisfy the insatiable desire for more. These things were made for us; we were not made for them.
That is to not to say that these accomplishments and material goods are evil; rather, wealth and virtue paired together can accomplish much good. Conversely, wealth and vice paired together can result in great evil. When material goods usurp the primacy of loving and serving God, they become idols.
When we treat wealth as more important than our commitment to God, the rightful hierarchy is abandoned and virtue crumbles. We are likely to steal—not only in what we take, but in what we fail to give, too. If we reduce the value of our education to a means for material success, we are inclined to cheat ourselves and those around us. Using short-cuts like artificial intelligence as a crutch only hinders your development as a student and as a person. If you’re using ChatGPT to write your paper, you might not be made for a 4.0 this semester.
That’s not a bad thing. You don’t derive your value as a person from your GPA; to not have a perfect transcript is not to be a failure. It’s not worth selling your integrity for; as Christians we must remember that the ends do not justify the means. This misprioritization of material and moral goods inclines us to justify evil actions so that good may result. For this reason we must endeavor to order the many goods in our lives properly.
That said, the environment at Notre Dame poses unique challenges. As students at an elite university, we are afforded many privileges. We have access to an expansive alumni network, a wealth of professors, and an environment of accomplished peers driving one another forward. As a result, there are many professional opportunities for us here—many that come with wealth, influence, and prestige.
But opportunities beyond the professional sphere exist. We have, on one hand, the examples of the priests living around us in our very residence halls. We have a premier theology department which thrives by practicing theology, and not just learning about it. Ample service opportunities are available to students, from BridgeND to MercyWorks, as well as club opportunities through organizations like Notre Dame Right to Life. There are extensive opportunities for formation, all aspiring towards the education of heart and mind.
On the other hand, we see the decadence of football games, at times rampant careerism, and endless LinkedIn self-promotion. And though there are great opportunities for formation, there are also many tantalizing opportunities in Chicago, D.C., and New York which, perhaps, should give us pause to question what exactly we’re seeking.
Each of us was made to fulfill some particular purpose as part of the Body of Christ. Some of us are called to be lawyers, others to be teachers; some businessmen, and others engineers. Some of us are called to parenthood, others to celibacy. We are all called to excel, but each of us has our own task.
To excel in this is true success. All are called to serve and do God’s work. The question, then, is:
Where are my talents best applied? In what career can I best serve God as he has made me to be? What kind of life should I live?
A portion of a meditation of John Henry Newman’s was published in the freshman edition of the Rover weeks ago. I’d like to return to it now. In it, Newman prays to be God’s “blind instrument.” He writes, “I ask not to see. I ask not to know. I ask simply to be used.”
Our common vocation is to be an instrument of God in all that we do on this earth: how we act in our affairs, great and small alike. Yet, our particular vocation, as Newman suggests, might never be fully known to us in this life. We may struggle between jobs; our role might always feel uncertain. For most of us undergraduates, our path forward is still being discerned.
Yet, our common vocation is clear. Therefore, we ask for constancy. We pray to keep our eyes fixed on the true objective. And we say together, Lead kindly light.
Jack Krieger is a junior from Pittsburgh, PA with majors in the Program of Liberal Studies and Economics, with a minor in constitutional studies. He can be reached at jkrieger@nd.edu.