"I don't have any idea what I want to do with my life." This was her response to my question about her plan after graduation. I clearly remember the moment when I sat face-to-face about this time last year with a fourth year student in my department to give her career advice. Contrary to my expectation, her official TOEIC score was high enough to surprise me. I could even sense a bit of frustration and emptiness in her thin smile when she looked down on the table that separated us. That was several months after I had transferred to this university from Daegu, where I taught English-Korean translation and interpreting to only graduate students whose ages ranged from their late twenties to mid-forties.

  At that moment, I remember, a thought came into my mind: I wasn't fully prepared to counsel an undergraduate like her, that is, a student confused, uninformed, and thus indecisive. Unlike the graduate students seeking a master's or a doctoral degree for some purpose or another in accordance with their mid- to long-term career goals, the students I met here lacked experience, resources, and most importantly, role models. Some may say that there were always such students in the past too, when it was relatively easy for one to get a job in a big company if he or she got an excellent mark in TOEIC or in a mostly written, normal recruitment test. Given the enormous pressure on Korea's young generation of today, however, we have a reason to feel empathetic and compassionate towards them.

  Admittedly, times have changed. Students have to be armed with more credentials and fill out more application forms to get a decent job than they would in the past. One fact hasn't changed, however. It is normally not so easy for students at this stage of life, who obtained such levels of knowledge and experience during their twenty three to twenty five-year-long lives, to have a clear life goal and know what they truly want to do for the rest of their lives. Even if they fail to get employed in, say, a large conglomerate by the time they graduate from university, that's not the end of the long and tortuous journey called "life." The real life begins when they are allocated a position in society and start sustaining themselves with money they earned in return for their not-so-precious labor. This is when, realizing the true face of the world around them, they start making informed and realistic decisions on their future courses in life.

  If my personal experience is any guide, many newly employed workers in a big company, a coveted workplace for many job applicants, were not satisfied with their quality of employment―even though this may not be true of employees of such companies in times like these. Out of the six workers in my office including myself―who were hired at the same time by an airline company that I worked for many years ago, four quit within the next three years. What has become of them? One is a lawyer, another is a high school teacher, and the third is an interpreter. However, this is not to say that students can just wait until they graduate from university, not exerting their utmost efforts. On the contrary, students have to make extraordinary efforts to get a "decent" job. Even if they fail, however, they don't have to be bitterly disappointed because the knowledge they acquired preparing to get a job will not go anywhere. That said, one factor is still not explicit in the above story: How financially capable they were at that time. One thing I know for certain is that not even one of them comes from a wealthy family.

  There's an old adage that goes, "He who laughs last, laughs best." I have no idea to whom this dictum is attributed, but I want them to remember this when they grow old. Steve Jobs, the late Apple CEO, once said in his commencement speech at Stanford University: "Stary hungry. Stay foolish." Taking a cue from this phrase, I would say, "Stay focused. Stay resolute."

By Prof. Joo Jin-kook

Dept. of English Language and Literature