Beverly, would this be an improvement?
Ten years have passed. I have yet to hold a job that I couldn’t have done just as well if I’d gone to an in-state junior college like so many of my high school classmates. If I published the biography of my life thus far, I’d have to call it I Was an Ivy League Secretary. I don’t regret my Penn education for a moment, not even when the monthly student loan bill shows up, but I sometimes think Penn must regret educating me. I’m only now beginning to figure out what I really want to do, how to translate my youthful raw ability into mature happiness and success. And I still look back at my work history and wonder how someone who I recently learned is talked about as one of the smartest kids ever to come out of Shelby County High School ended up where I am now.
YES!!
I was piddling with HTML, and you went and were brilliant in the meantime. That's loads better.
Heh. DH criticized that version as "still too whiny for an alumni magazine," so this is the third try:
Ten years have passed. I have yet to hold a job that actually uses my elite education. If I published the biography of my life thus far, I’d have to call it I Was an Ivy League Secretary. I don’t regret going to Penn for a moment, not even when the monthly student loan bill shows up, but I sometimes think Penn must regret educating me. I’ve taken a strange path, from valedictorian of my high school class through four years on the Dean’s List at Penn to “ten years of increasingly responsible administrative experience.” I’m only now beginning to figure out what I really want to do, how to translate my youthful raw ability into mature happiness and success. And now that I’m starting to find my path, I spend a lot of time reflecting on how I got so lost in a career wilderness.
It's quite a challenge. I'm doing this as a way of facing all the bad choices I made and trying to exorcise the demons by transforming them into My First Sale, hopefully accompanied by a nice zaftig check I can use to start my business account for W------- Communications. But y'all are right that wallowing in the sense of failure won't help it sell.
Yes, still better. I think I'd do something with the last sentence, though.
"starting to find my path" just reiterates the previous sentence, and nobody whose life is chock full of to-do wants to read that you "spend a lot of time reflecting" on anything, IMO. "I do wonder how I got so lost", etc., would do it, I should think.
Nice! This should probably come further along in the essay, but I'd love to read more about the whole pre-professional atmostphere at Penn, and how that affects how people think about their post-collegiate lives. I do wonder, however, how excited they'd be to print that. I dunno. Either way, I can't wait to read the rest!
That's one of the many facets I'm considering including. The hardest thing is narrowing a decade or so of experience into a nice, focused essay of 1500 words or so. I'm probably going to leave out the depression I fell into (and only recently got over) after I moved to Seattle, because Too Many Changes at Once and How To Build a Social Circle From Scratch is a whole 'nother topic or three, even though it definitely delayed me making needed changes. Another issue I'm not sure if or how to handle is the fact the InterVarsity staffworkers my senior year encouraged people to consider taking AA-type jobs because our ministries were more important than our careers, and that way we'd have time and energy for them. I'm not sure that was bad advice for the handful who went on to become staffworkers or pastors or missionaries themselves, and for awhile I was trying to get onto that track. But I wasn't one of the Chosen Few the staff was hand-grooming to follow in their footsteps, so I wish I hadn't paid so much attention to their advice. Oh well.
It all comes under "Experience," and for the writer, under "Fodder."
I'm just giggling with a little bit of glee that as someone who gets the magazine to her house, I'll get to read it in its final version.
Assuming they accept it--this is one of those things where it seems more appropriate to submit the whole thing than to do a query.
