For Students: More to Work than Work
By Julia Greenwood
As college students—and especially as Hoyas—we work. That’s what we do. It’s what we did to get here, and it’s what we do now: homework, projects, papers, perhaps employment. Even when we’re not working, we get countless emails from the Career Center about jobs and internships and interview preparations, and the contingent of our peers perpetually dressed in suits, always on their way to interviews and networking events, remind us of the work that we hope to have one day.
Pre-professionalism and the emphasis placed on career development and the future are not necessarily bad things; it’s important to prepare students for the workforce and the job search. Our campus culture, however, obscures the true meaning of work. It is, of course, what we do to finish a paper or to pay the bills, but in Catholic Social Thought, work is a whole lot more. It has inherent dignity, it’s an expression of our own human dignity, and it strengthens society.
This is a beautiful way to conceptualize work; one that is heartening—at least to me—especially during Georgetown’s semester-long “midterm season,” when it’s easy to get lost in the series of tasks one needs to accomplish, buried under to-do lists. Catholic social teaching tells us that work is not only what we do (and what we need to get done), but our means of contributing to our communities and the world. Moreover, it reminds us that not only will our work have value when we have found ourselves a profession, a career, an occupation, but so too does it have value now, in our vocation as students.
We already know, I hope, that there’s more to life than just work. But there’s also more to work than just work.
Julia Greenwood (C'19) is an undergraduate studying American studies at Georgetown.