Like every college student, I’ve been stuck on the age-old question: what will I do after graduation? As a senior, it’s more pertinent to me than it ever was. I have changed my concentration in CSOM, enrolled in a co-concentration, and added two minors, hoping that in one of them I would find my future career. However, as a Catholic, there’s an extra question I want to answer with my career choice: how can I live out my Catholic values in my career?
For some, the answer is finding work in a Catholic organization. Teaching in a Catholic school is always something I’ve considered, and I’ve been told that working for a diocese is very spiritually fulfilling. If I want to utilize my business degree from BC, though, my options are more limited. Some choose to work for a Catholic non-profit on the ubiquitous aspects of operations that all organizations, for-profit or otherwise, must have, such as marketing or computer systems. Others will simply accept that their work life and spiritual life do not have to mix, and use their degrees to get jobs squarely in the private for-profit sector. Still others will find that a job doesn’t have to be specifically Catholic to help you live out your faith; worldwide charitable organizations might not identify as Catholic, but doing good works for others will always be an integral part of the Catholic identity.
I don’t think that your job has to be related to your faith for you to feel fulfilled or be a good Catholic. Maybe my desire to find a job that relates to my religion is a way to cope with the abundance of choice I have to answer that first question of “what will I do after graduation”; almost arbitrarily defining a section of jobs that will be the only ones I allow myself to pursue takes out a significant part of the decision-making when entering the workforce. Either way, I do think that I want to choose the opportunity to positively engage with my faith over the chance of a higher-paying for-profit job. While it might be presumptuous of me to say that I’m ‘sacrificing’ a higher salary, the Boston College alumni network is no slouch when it comes to offering recent graduates entry-level business positions. If a BC student really wants to find a ‘good’ job after graduation, the tools are all there. If they want to find a job that does more than pay their bills, they’ll have to look a little harder.
Besides the alumni network and the BC Career Center, which is a great resource for job-searching and career-matching of all kinds, I recently found an organization called 80,000 Hours. They match workers up with jobs that practically and effectively tackle humanity-wide problems. Again, while they are not strictly a Catholic organization, someone who wants their job to fulfill their Catholic values will not be disappointed by working directly to benefit humanity. The real test is finding a job that matches your interests in work to your spiritual goals. But even with all of these options available to us, not everyone can work for a charity or teach the Catholic youth. Humanity needs all kinds of workers, and everyone has a different calling. In many ways, there isn’t anything inherently better about working in a soup kitchen than being a financial analyst. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from engaging with this problem, it’s that as long as we serve God in the way that we know best, He will take care of the rest.
Grant is a senior studying Information Systems at the Carroll School of Management. He keeps busy by studying and writing for The Torch.
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