What Happens Next?
A graduation is a beginning as much as it’s an end. Ever since I felt the gravitational pull of the last few classes of my academic work at Penn hurling me towards graduation and the chasm of uncertainty on the other side of it, I’ve been thinking about what might be next. I’ve also been asked about it a lot. Initially, some of that thinking was about graduate school, but upon reflection I’m really not quite ready for that. At least in the way I want to do it. So I’m going to hold back, for now. Much of the work of the past four years has been about really understanding what it is that I want to spend my time working on. Or more explicitly, where I want to spend that time, something I feel ever so acutely since turning fifty. At first it really seemed like it’d be in the field of applied psychology. Then it shifted towards political science, which still very much excites me, challenging as it is and despite its large overlap with my professional life in the NBC newsroom. For a while it was being a creative writer and considering what warming up an application to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop might look like. But through it all it’s really been the study of antiquity and religion. And while I got to spend a lot of time in some wonderful classes at Penn working on that, I always wished it had been more.
So that’s at least a place to start, at the beginning. Untethered from the structure of class, or the constraints of graded assignments, the real work is to keep going, but independently. To take what Penn taught me, but also to structure it around what I learned about myself. To spend the freedom of the next year inhaling all the things I wanted to do over the past few years but never really got the opportunity of time to indulge. At the moment, it’s four areas of interest:
The academic study of antiquity, with a particular focus on issues of faith and religion
Deepening my romantic languages proficiency, in terms of strengthening my Italian and French, but also striving towards advanced Latin
Indulging my somewhat unexpected passion for opera
Actively traveling in support of these three areas
As I write this in March 2025, class at Penn is in its final week and I am awaiting final grading. It’s an exciting time and last week I even got to try on a cap and gown for the first time in over thirty years. I still don’t know which side the tassel is supposed to go. Graduation is in a couple of months, but slowing down and relaxing is proving difficult. Now that I no longer have class, and everything has opened up, I’m like someone who hasn’t eaten all day finding themselves at the all-you-can-eat buffet, and all I can hear in my head is Jerry Seinfeld’s thoughts on the horror of what he finds there:
”What is the idea of the buffet? Well, things are bad, how could we make it worse? Why don’t we put people who are already struggling with portion control, into some kind of debauched Caligula food orgy of unlimited human consumption? Let’s make the entranceway a chocolate-syrup water park slide. The buffet is like taking your dog to Petco, and letting your dog do the shopping. You give him your wallet in the parking lot and go “why don’t you go in, get whatever you think is the right amount of dog food for you. Use your dog judgment. I’m gonna go wait in the car. Leave the window open a crack so I can breathe.” People do not do well in an unsupervised eating environment. Nobody would walk into a restaurant and say “I’ll have a yogurt parfait, spare rib, meat pie, crab leg, four cookies and an egg-white omelet”. People are building death-row last meal wish lists on these plates. It’s like a perfect working model of all their emotional problems and personal difficulties. They just walk around. They kind of hold it out. “This is what I’m dealing with”. It’s a salad with a scoop of ice cream on it. I’ve got some unresolved issues I’m trying to work out here at the buffet. Start accosting strangers. “Excuse me, where did you get that? I didn’t even see that. What is that? A caramelized chicken leg? I gotta try that. Give me yours. You know where they are. You can get more.” Come on!”
So right now it’s all a bit unfocused and literally all-consuming. But even writing out the four areas of focus feels helpful. I’ve been doing Coursera classes, which have been wonderful, and something which led me to Penn in the first place five years ago. It’s fun to go back and complete the circle. I’ve been hitting the Duolingo pretty hard and finished Latin, French and Italian, which feels good. I’ve recently started the Paideia Institute’s Living Latin course, which is a massive, length Latin course that really goes deep on grammar and vocabulary, as well as applications to historical readings. I love it, but it’s hard going so far. We have a trip to Europe coming up in April. I’ve also realized that so much of what energized and excited me over the past four years comes together in opera, and this past weekend I crossed something off my bucket list and finally went to see a performance of Puccini’s La Boheme at The Metropolitan Opera in New York. It was, of course, incredible, and even found myself openly weeping at some of it. It really was just one of the most incredibly beautiful experiences of my life, and I can’t wait to do it again sometime soon. In parallel, I’ve been inhaling the Met Opera in HD subscription archives, going to the screenings they have every couple of months in theaters, and educating myself on the history of opera itself. And for as old as this is, for me it’s so fresh and exciting. It’s a feeling that finally, finally I have found something so magical, so uplifting and inspiring, that I cannot ever imagine myself ever letting go.
All of this means letting go of some things too. I’m dialing down all the work I’ve been doing with generative artificial intelligence, which feels like it’s run its course for me, at least for the moment. I’ve built a massive body of work with it, and I still have some potentially interesting client work in the pipeline, but overall it’s not something I’m leaning into as hard as I used to. Maybe I’ll be back. I used to describe life as a four-ring circus between real work, school, the chaos of life with a teenage daughter and the generative projects I was involved in and spinning up all the time. Now it’s really a more focused two-ring circus between professional life and its enablement of post-graduation, but not post-graduate, pursuits, all of which are a true labor of love. I already feel a strong sense of calm in this simplification.
So to answer the question of what’s next, it’s a simple response. Over the next year, I’m going to spend as much time as I can inhaling all the things Penn taught me to love. I’m going to travel as much as I can in their pursuit. I’m going to deepen my love of ancient language, religion, and the sheer euphoria of listening to opera. I’m going to supercharge my curiosity for learning, but also realize that the untethered joy of learning, and just sitting with the material and doing nothing, its its own source of pleasure and reward. Might all of this end up becoming something more formalized in a post-graduate application at some point in the future? Perhaps. There’s certainly a couple of postgraduate programs at Oxford and Harvard which have caught my eye. But now is not the time for those. Now is the time to savor what just happened, but also to truly indulge my passion and curiosity for what Penn taught me about myself. That curiosity and an authentically passionate love of learning are for me, quite literally, life giving.
Follow along with my journey here.
