Curriculum vita. The course of a life. I see quite a few CVs, although I’m not on any search committees. As I was examining one the other day I recollected how, when I first tried to put one together, I was told to leave high school and its achievements out of it. Nobody’s really interested in that anymore. Presumably college is an indication of choice whereas high school is a matter of where your parents live. Or how much money they have. College says something indicative about you. Although many parents—not mine, to be clear—help bankroll college and may have a say in where you go, college is “your choice.” Unbounded by geography, young people mostly old enough to take care of themselves, are given a really tremendous responsibility here. And it was certainly influenced by high school.
Some choices are economic, and that also says something about a person. Some are faith-based, which definitely says something about you. Some are terribly ambitious, and those tend to get you the biggest head start on your life course. Of course, some of us did not realize that. Some of us, not sure if college would work or not, chose somewhere close to home. Somewhere where escape, if needed, was possible. And of course, your college shows up ever after on your CV. I often wonder if things would’ve worked out differently if I’d gone somewhere else for college. I needed somewhere understanding to shake me out of the false narrative I’d been told. Had I gone somewhere more strident I might’ve retrenched in my pre-decided ideas. Of course, those pre-decided ideas are what made me decide to go to college in the first place.
How can we possibly measure the course of a life? From big event to big event? So many of the meaningful bits occur in small spaces wedged in-between the large markers of who we are. We can’t possibly know all the consequences of our choices, even as we attempt to select the right option at each step of the way. And there’s no guarantee regarding the outcome. Were it a feasible option I’d go back to college again—I would start at a different place this time—to test the results of my first decade of higher education. For, I know, although a CV can reveal more than it might intend, it leaves much more unsaid than it can possibly say.
