AESOP 2014 Blog: A Scene in Seatown - Bryan's June in the Northwest

Seattle showing her colors the other night. (Anyone see the space needle?)

Class of 2018, what up!

Let me set a scene for you: I’m currently writing from a nice little coffee shop in Seattle (not Starbucks, I promise). A punk-rock barista is playing jazz records over speakers that barely reach my ears in a dimly lit alcove within the shop. I’m drinking a latte that is strangely delicious while I slowly make progress on this blog entry (among an increasing number of other things). For a kid who grew up in a suburb where lattes were just as obscure as John Coltrane, such vignettes as the one I currently find myself in are laughable, but they are also entrancing. For the past month, I’ve been living in a city and carrying out a life frequently defined by these scenes, and while at first I found it hard to get past Seattle’s novelty, now I find myself disarmingly taken over by it.

Not all my time here has been spent in coffee shops though. My real calling has been a program that I have described to others as a ‘business boot camp.' It’s called Koru, and I have to admit that it has changed my life. I know what you might be thinking at this point: “Woah, I thought this was the AESOP blog? What the hell is this guy doing talking about coffee, jazz, and life-changing boot camps? Can’t you just stick to backpacking or something?” To be honest, questions like those are totally reasonable, but bear with me for a second; if this post goes according to plan, I’ll arrive at an insightful way to tie all these things together at some point soon.

So the first thing I’ll address is this Koru thing. What is Koru? Koru is a program designed for liberal arts students to help accelerate them towards getting their first great job. You practice business skills, and help identify what you are passionate about and how you can translate that into the job of your dreams. The Koru website does a good job of explaining all the other little details of the program.

Why has it been life-changing for me? Simply put, Koru has done a tremendous job at bridging the skills I learned at Bates (complex problem-solving, analytical thinking, writing) into something an employer likes to see. I now have the cards in my hand for immediately getting a meaningful job after this year is over and I walk off that graduation stage.

How does this relate to you as a incoming first year? Well to be honest, it probably doesn’t. If you were anything like me coming into Bates, jobs were the last thing on your mind. Hell, just registering for the right AESOP trip was causing me anxiety. But maybe this is also exactly why I am telling you about it. Early in my Bates career I think I fell into the camp of people who didn’t quite pick up on the looming of nature of post-Bates life. I saw school as a self-contained entity; a place where we get our diplomas and then try and find a job in something completely unrelated to what we had been doing for the four years prior. And of course I've come to see this viewpoint as kind of foolish. If Koru has taught me one thing that might be applicable to you all as incoming students, it is that there are always connections between the liberal arts and the “real world,” and that they are far more fortified than people peg them to be. To be clear—my advice to you is simple: embrace your upcoming foray into Bates academics with as much open-mindedness as possible. Never approach a class on Frost or abstract probability theory as a necessarily closed environment of academia. As it turns out, the thinking you'll do in these classes isn't far from the thinking you’ll be doing in your future jobs.

Being open-minded is another key lesson I’ve taken away from my time being a city-dweller in Seattle this past month. Never living in a city before, I was certainly unsure I'd be able to fit into the fast-paced and diverse culture. But just by being open-minded, by embracing the punk-rock barista, I’ve been able to have one of the best months of my recent life.

I think that will do it for now. Since Koru is now over, I’ll have more time to post on this blog more often, so keep checking back for updates. I'll be here some of July and plan on going on some sick trips throughout Washington. Also look out for posts from the other coordinators and leaders.

As always if you're ever looking to talk about AESOP or Bates, or even have a reaction to what we write here, please feel free to drop us an email at aesopbates@gmail.com

Looking forward to the fall!

-Bryan