What color is your parachute?

Solving the 'employment problem'

I always knew that employment was in my future. I remember vividly the last summer I was still technically ineligible for work. At 15, I had just spent the year away at boarding school, feeling terribly independent, and now found myself home, unemployed, and bored. I spent most of the summer in degrees of despondency, wishing I had a job. I envied the independence and collegiality of work – work friends? – and of course, the spending money.

Both my parents worked for as long as I’d been sentient, my mother always complaining about how there was never enough money, in spite of her long hours and education. I understood employment as some kind of unspoken duty of adulthood, but I assumed that if I embraced this duty, and worked diligently to prove and improve myself as a human, I would find both satisfying and sustaining work.

I carried this sense of duty with me from an early age, though I often found it in conflict with its nemesis, defiance. I experienced a constant push-pull between the two. Was it possible, I wondered, to both uphold one’s duty and also defy the expectations of others? 

My grandmother, Marjorie, had likely wrestled with the same question. She became a Soviet spy at the young age of 22, recruited by her future husband to become an espionage spouse. Her death weighed heavy on me as I transitioned from high school to college. At the same time that I chose to defy the legacy standard she had set by going to Barnard instead of Vassar, I also yearned to achieve something with my life that would make her proud. But what?

The meritocratic euphoria of the early 2000s encouraged the somewhat deluded aspirational thinking that yields slogans like, “If you can dream it, you can be it,” and “The sky's the limit!” Perhaps there are others who inhabit a “dream it, be it” world, but in my experience, the world after college was chaotic and uncertain. The headwinds of both economic turbulence and financial uncertainty had a significant shaping effect on my life, extinguishing the spark of dreams I never had the chance to pursue.

Between 2008 and 2009, the global economy entered a kind of zero-gravity freefall. Billions of assets that previously “existed” dematerialized overnight, leaving behind them a kind of slow-mo black hole vacuum effect, the soundtrack of which was a long, loud, sustained, “Nooooo…!”

The graveyard of abandoned dreams

I had studied the political and economic history of the Great Depression, but still, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the chaos that followed it caught me by surprise. I had spent my adolescence busily striving within what I was led to believe was a strict meritocracy. “Work hard, and you will be rewarded” was my core motivating assumption. I lacked guidance and a clear sense of how my college choices for both study and extracurriculars would ladder up to the paramount “success story” I had always been promised. Perhaps foolishly, I simply trusted that if I kept doing my best, the pathway to the promised reward would reveal itself.

I went to college with the whimsical idea that I’d major in English or philosophy but a first-year course in International Relations revealed my passion for global affairs. In it, I discovered a deep craving to understand how the world works, and to be part of the infrastructure of its transformation. I understood from my course work that both diplomacy and intelligence were vital avenues for U.S. action abroad, and wondered if either the foreign service or the CIA would offer a gateway to my promised future. I couldn’t help feeling the seductive pull of following in my grandmother, Marjorie’s footsteps, though of course she had found her calling working for the other side. 

Yet my hopeful optimism and entrepreneurial persistence were thwarted at every turn. In early spring of my junior year, I secured a highly selective internship with the State Department in Peru only to learn in late June that I was ineligible for secret clearance because my stepmother was a notable foreign national with “politically sensitive” family members. (Her father had been assassinated while running for President in Lebanon nearly 20 years earlier). Deeply disappointed that my well-laid plans had been for naught, I pivoted, somehow manufacturing a DIY internship in the Dominican Republic out of a book I bought at Barnes & Noble called Alternatives to the Peace Corps. While the experience was life-changing in many ways, it didn’t deliver the same resume punch as “U.S. Department of State.” 

My senior year, my academic advisor connected me with a long-time friend of his who had retired from the CIA but frequently referred possible analysts to the agency. But when I finally received a call, I was unprepared. I remember vividly, sitting on Columbia’s Low Library steps, fumbling my way through a conversation I knew was going badly. I hung up the phone and cursed myself, disappointed I had inadvertently squandering such an unexpected opportunity. I thought enviously of Marjorie and how nice it must have been to have her boyfriend offer her a way out of the post-crash unemployment blues.

When campus recruiting for consulting was a bust, I gave up on the post-graduation “professional on-ramp” and found various ways of employing myself over the next year. I spent a summer on a ranch in Colorado, enrolled in yoga teacher training, and spent six months as an au pair in Paris, fulfilling another lifelong dream, perhaps inspired by my grandmother, to live in the city of light. If I had not rekindled a relationship with my college boyfriend, I might have stayed longer – maybe forever. As I boarded a plane back home, I left the multiverse reality of “Alicia who stayed in Paris” behind.

Time to pull up your socks

When I finally returned to America in July 2009, the global recession precipitated by the subprime mortgage crisis was in full effect. My various ranch and au pair adventures had managed to delay the inevitable, but now it was time to put my nose to the grindstone – to my duty – and figure out how to do some “real work.” 

I moved in with my college boyfriend in Baltimore, then just as quickly moved out, and into a group house in Arlington, VA. I tried every possible avenue to unearth my life’s purpose. I read “What Color is Your Parachute?” diligently photocopying and completing each of the exercises in a black and white composition notebook. I enrolled at a temp agency and accepted assignments working for $12 an hour (nearly 2x the minimum wage at the time) as an executive assistant. I took the bus in and out of DC each morning because it was so much cheaper than the Metro. During lunch or after work, I attended events, hosted daily by think tanks all over D.C.,  in hopes of meeting someone who could offer me a job. 

Finally, I landed a real job in the most DC way possible. 

After an event on “Women in War” at the U.S. Institute of Peace, I found myself in an elevator with an Afghan man who smiled and inquired about my purpose. 

“What brings you to the Institute of Peace today?” he asked. 

Returning his smile, I answered his direct question honestly:

“To find a job,” I said, hoping my bluntness might generate a lead.

He pulled out a business card and handed it to me: Institute for the Study of War, it said, which seemed ironic, given our present location. 

“Thanks!” I said, still in awe of the fact that some people had their contact info printed on a piece of paper that fit in their pocket. 

“We’re hiring!” he said, smiling, as he walked out of the elevator. 

He was right. ISW had an opening for a development associate. After high school, I’d canvassed for the Human Rights Campaign and in college, I’d interned in the development office, which helped qualify me for the role. I felt a little unsure about the partisan alignment of my work – the founder was surely more hawkish than I – but it was a job, one that offered a salary and benefits with room for professional growth. 

Who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth? Perhaps it was time for a little defiance? 

Eight months later, I was the Development Manager.

The author with GEN David Petraeus at a gala dinner celebrating his return from his Afghanistan tour

I have always found the job search process to be both exhausting and frustrating, and still do. I have to imagine that there’s a more efficient way to organize human effort than asking people to submit desperate petitions into black boxes. But the truth is, there are few things as satisfying as landing a job offer after a long and discouraging search.

Marjorie would often say you need to ‘pull up your socks’ and get on with it, pragmatically making the best of less than ideal circumstances. As she sailed from Hoboken to London towards an uncertain future, she had met the first two tests of post-college achievement: a husband and a job.

I’d failed my first-round interview with the CIA, but at the Institute for the Study of War, somehow still found myself on the bleeding edge of American national security and defense. I learned the differences between military services and ranks, the wide gap that exists between enlisted service members and officers, and the true meaning of the “military-industrial complex.” Even though I would never have planned for any aspect of the career I somehow – miraculously? – found myself in, I relished the success of having achieved the dream: a billet for employment. Duty fulfilled.