Class of 2013: Stop Putting Guardrails on Your Future

From a very young age, I’ve been fascinated by the news. I remember as a young child, watching my dad eat breakfast in the morning flipping through the pages of the newspaper.

As he flipped each page, something would catch his attention and we’d end up talking about the stories he was reading. It was through that ritual in the morning that I discovered the world from a small town in Pennsylvania.

But more important, it was how I discovered the power of serendipity. My dad turned pages of that newspaper not knowing what was next, not knowing what might interest him: a headline, a picture, or the beginning of an article that might grab his attention and he’d share it with me.

One of the downsides of reading a newspaper on the Web or on a tablet, or following the news on Facebook or Twitter is that you lose that sense of serendipity because you end up having fewer random encounters with the news, fewer detours to interesting tales, stories, and adventures.

In some ways, our lives mimic how the news is now delivered to us—in narrow ways, tailored to our personal interests. From a young age these days we’re told to focus, whether on a particular sport or activity or on a specific subject.

We’re putting too many guardrails on our road to the future. We’re encouraged in high school to pick a practical major in college that will lead to a solid career with a good paycheck, even though many of the jobs of tomorrow don’t even exist today. We’re urged in college to schedule each of our days down to the very last minute to be sure we graduate on time. And now as you get ready to graduate, I’m sure you’ve heard advice in recent weeks to have a plan for your career.

But life is highly uncertain and the roads you take from college will have many twists and turns, and many detours that are impossible to predict today.

I want to encourage you to embrace the serendipity of life. Because what you end up finding of value in your career, and in your life, often comes in those chance encounters, those wrong turns, that story on the next page of the newspaper that you never thought would interest you.

When I was 18, I thought I’d be standing here as a network news anchor. I went to Ithaca College in New York to major in broadcast journalism. But in my first week there, in addition to joining the student television station, I decided to write for the student newspaper. Over the course of that fall semester, even though in my head I still wanted to be a television journalist, my heart was really in the newspaper. By my junior year, when I was appointed editor, I was on a far different path than the one I had planned as a freshman. The serendipity of life had pulled me in a new direction.

Now looking back on college 20 years later, I can clearly identify two critical moments that helped guide me to the place where I am today. And again, serendipity played a role in both encounters.

The first was in the fall of my junior year. I was flipping through U.S. News & World Report’s annual college guide, when by chance I came across a picture of the college interns who helped put the guide together. I applied for the internship and was hired to spend that following summer in Washington, DC working on the college guide.

It was not a glamorous job, but I wanted to be a professional journalist, so I wasn’t going to let a summer pass by without getting to know some of the writers and editors at the magazine. I had the opportunity to be mentored by a managing editor of the college guide, someone who helped me build the understanding I have today of higher education.

Your faculty formed your mentor network in college. In the real world, you won’t have faculty at every turn, but continue to seek out others with more experience to provide you with guidance and advice. We want to help.

The second encounter in college that ended up paving many new roads in my life, was a random find one evening in the last semester of college. I came across a brochure for the Pulliam Journalism Fellowship, which awarded paid summer internships for college graduates to work at the daily newspapers in Indianapolis or Phoenix.

Even though I was in the midst of interviewing for full-time permanent jobs after graduation, I decided to apply for this temporary gig in Arizona because I had never been there. I got the position and took it. On the first day of the internship I was assigned to the business desk. At first I was disappointed because I wanted to be on the news desk. But the editor took one look at me, and said “You look young. You must know something about technology. Our technology reporter is off for the summer. You’re now our new technology reporter.”

That was the summer of 1995, when many of you were three years old. But in terms of technology, it might as well have been the Colonial days. Most of us connected to the Internet by dialing up to AOL. Browsing the Web was such a new concept, I had to define what the World Wide Web was in every article I wrote. But that assignment (and getting over my disappointment of not being assigned to the news desk) helped me cover one of hottest stories that summer.

At the end of the summer in Phoenix, thanks to the friends I met on the internship, I landed a job as reporter at a newspaper on the coast of North Carolina and two years later came to Washington, D.C. to become a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Neither of theses jobs or cities had ever been part of my grand plan at 18.

But I stand here today to say that the last 20 years have been a fantastic ride. Sure, I’m not the network news anchor I thought I’d be at 18 or the daily newspaper journalist I thought I’d be when I sat in your spot at graduation in 1995. We always talk about the road we took, but forget that sometimes the best opportunities in life happen because of the road not taken.

Jeffrey Selingo is editor at large at The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students.

This post is an excerpt from a commencement address he gave at Morningside College in Iowa on May 11. Photos: DKAR Images/Getty Images (ocean); Jeffrey Selingo (commencement).