Sitting in her massive office that overlooks city high-rises, rapidly and gracefully ascending the financial ladder as she invents new marketing strategies, is a Chief Executive Officer. She presides over her peers, creates her own schedule, orders interns to go on coffee runs, and lives the life that many aspire to and envy.
A thriving musician lives an equally, if differently, enviable lifestyle. She travels often, creatively creates and produces her own music, and freely expresses herself through song. Both the entrepreneurial CEO and the musician possess a powerful sense of self: both followed their dreams, but one has chosen a much more socially desirable and respected career path.
Is the fantasy of a lucrative career, with its seemingly instantaneous monetary benefits, inducing students to abandon their personal passions or careers that align with those passions? Students are simply too mindful of future remuneration, not taking full advantage of a temporary setting, Stone Ridge. Our school serves as a soft patch of grass should students fall off of their determined swings.
Ms. Fontanone considers high school the prime time for experimenting, “especially while the responsibilities that you have in high school are not as large as the responsibilities that you have as an adult. Not to say that they’re not as important, they’re just different. And when your job is primarily to be a student,” she encourages “young girls to learn how to take educated risks in a place that’s both safe and nurturing, since you can always grow from your mistakes and teachable moments here.”
Within our community of fellow wayfarers along this journey of lifelong learning–from both our successes and failures–where does this pervasive, intense pressure to pursue profitable jobs, those with more immediate and tangible success, come from?
Maddie Payne, ’16, understands why “some people think art is such a difficult area in which to have a career, but [she] think[s] it’s also possible to find some way to incorporate art with income.” Payne herself is an avid art history aficionado currently considering a career that involves the restoration of paintings. Payne uses Stone Ridge as her time to discover this passion, explore it, and follow it vigorously. She’s taken AP art classes and even had an internship this past summer at the Stair Sainty Gallery in Mayfair, London.
The financial fantasy of a stereotypically lucrative career, such as law, finance, or medicine, indisputably suggests more immediate prosperity than the life of the artist. In many other careers, the climb up the ladder is incredibly arduous, requiring a slow and steady pace. In business, however, this climb is often not as leisurely nor as stable; the work you put in does produce more visible, palpable benefits.
Even Ms. Fontanone, before unearthing in college her true zeal for literature, considered majoring in economics and admits to succumbing to the overwhelming vision of “rolling around in stacks of money.” Students naturally gravitate toward the immediately lucrative careers rather than toward those that require a longer, strenuous road to success.
But what defines such success? The outward, social success and respect afforded to a glimmering financial career is not the only type of success encouraged here at Stone Ridge. Our mission statement doesn’t describe Stone Ridge as a second home that raises its students to ascend the occupational hierarchy; rather, it raises students steeped in faith, intellect, and confidence, students who enter the workforce having honed such values.
Ms. Brownlee reminds us of Kahlil Gibran’s poem, “On Work,” from The Prophet, of which the thesis is “love is work made visible.” It is Ms. Brownlee’s steadfast belief that “our work is our way of sharing our love and light with the world. When someone finds a job that is at the intersection of her passions and her gifts, she has the potential to change the world, whatever that job may be.”
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