What I Wish

Before I went to planning school, like many of my colleagues, I was hunting for a professional niche. My post-undergraduate career commitment had lost appeal, and I was both discouraged and inspired: frustrated with my first steps into the world and convinced I had more to give. I chose a graduate program in planning because it looked to offer multiple options for the future and seemed to light an inner fire I was unable to articulate, then.

I suppose it is the unveiling of inner fires that planning school affords. More aptly, I could hardly have believed my far reaching corners of ambition or my deep seated ideals. What I could have not known and might have liked to, though excitement often lies in surprise, is that planning school would only bolster me with more hope, greater confidence, and stronger tools to support the lofty, silent, underlying aim I, and many aspiring planners, innately held: To save the world, deliberately - one place at a time.

My first day of grad school orientation, a future classmate introduced herself to me as we sat on the collegiate courtyard grass. She was in her mid twenties, looked much like myself at the time, fresh young skin and a hint of a smile as though she held the next punch line for the funniest joke. We exchanged basic information: who we were, from whence we came, and eventually, we arrived at the usual question of what other work we'd been doing thus far. She looked at me, frankly, as though she'd been waiting months to say this outloud and would find great comfort in my ability to identify. "Well," she began with the cavalier accent one only finds in Northern Illinois, "I grew up on a farm, studied Economics at an all girls college, and for the last two years,” she smiled, “I've been selling stainless steel valves." She and I both followed with reasons why the position must have been valuable: sales experience, project oversight, and then, almost immediately, our banter silenced.

Selling stainless steel valves. Let that sink its way into your psyche for a moment.

Without a need to feign interest, we mustered the only appropriate response. We laughed. I laughed knowingly in a way that said, "Me too. Me and everyone I know. We're all just wandering around with these fancy bachelor degrees: selling stainless steel valves." I remember this moment crisply with fondness as though my newfound colleague had given affirmation to my own indecision and inner strife. Of course we could not settle gently in the valve-selling world! There was work to be done.

I wish I could have known how greatly planning school would influence this juncture in my life. If only my first professor had told me I would graduate believing the world was ripe for change and I was its agent. I wish I would have known I would develop many perceptual lenses, small and enormous, to see the world through. That I would nearly relinquish my own perspective and replace it with waves of questions, analyses, and theories produced idly on a Saturday afternoon. I wish I could have known that never again would I simply observe at face value and assume my own impressions to be real. Planning school, if only I could have known, would empower me to ask eternally, to seek endlessly, and to push on forward when hope wore thin.

Less desperately, I might have liked to know a bit more about Excel, digital Design softwares, and social studies. However, I arrived perfectly packaged just as I was and certain to hone my skills along the way. Perhaps I would have liked a tiny heads up, a sort of figurative mother hen, to take me aside, primp me, with pride, and knowingly say

Enjoy the summer beforehand. Revel in the preface. For soon you, too, will graduate. You will confront both subterfuge and opportunity, both hope and despair. But first, there you will be in cap and gown, perched upon the precipice of your becoming: head full, eyes wide, tassel turned.