Sick of their jobs in corporate America and motivated by the need for personal fulfillment, three high-stakes professionals fold their hands to place their bets on school and new careers in liberal arts.

It can be heard on every campus across the country: "Let me just get out of school and start making money. Then I'll start living!" Frustrated students dream of the day they'll graduate from the classroom to the boardroom, from minimum-wage labor to a career they love.

But when the real money starts rolling in, the reality of life-after-school might turn out to be less than thrilling. Sometimes up-and-comers want nothing more than to veer off the road to success, admit they don't enjoy the direction they're heading, and pull up for a couple of years at a rest stop called school. But that takes courage.

Our society approves of certain life paths, while frowning at others. People don't think it's normal to leave a prestigious position and a puffy purse after just a few years in a profession. "What?! Bright, successful lawyer suddenly wants to compose poetry? Computer programmer seeks time for philosophical thought? What's this world coming to?"

But mid-course corrections take place every day, and what better place to chart them than at the UI. Although neither graduate admissions offices nor university departments were able to provide any statistics supporting a new trend toward a quest for self-fulfillment, we found three examples of responsible and confident folks who chose to leave corporate America and return to school -- specifically, the University of Iowa.

Todd Ryan, 27, a former computer programmer, smiles broadly when he talks about his work as a graduate philosophy student. "I am mentally and physically healthier now," he says with conviction.

Todd Ryan

Three years ago, Todd was spending ten hours a day analyzing computer systems for Amoco Corporation, and his weekends seemed too short to spend his $43,000 salary. Today he is in his third year of a Ph.D. program in philosophy and enjoying regular daylong dates with Sartre, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Now he has more than enough time to spend his teaching assistant's meager stipend.

"I am much closer to being happy," says Todd, who is sprawled comfortably in the lounge of the English-Philosophy Building (EPB). It's 10:30 in the morning and he is relaxing after "Principles of Reasoning," the course he teaches as a full-time teaching assistant. At this time of day, when he was working in the Chicago offices of Amoco, he was either at a business meeting trying to stay focused, at his desk trying to meet a deadline, or on a business trip finding out what kind of computer system might be best for a client's needs.

He didn't have the silver hoop earring he now sports in his left ear, and when he looked out the panoramic window of his 43rd-floor office, he saw the glittering expanse of Lake Michigan. Today, peeking through one of the narrow windows in his second-floor EPB office, he sees the much less imposing ribbon of the Iowa River. Yet he claims his horizons have broadened substantially. And so has his life.

"I really doubled my life," says Todd, his lanky six-foot-one frame stretched diagonally between the table and the floor. "I have twice as much time now."

He uses the extra time for reading (mostly Sartre), music (classical, Dylan, and REM), and walks. In August, he took his girlfriend to Paris for a week. On his previous salary, he wouldn't have minded overpaying for wine in fancy cafes, but on this trip, he chose to buy it in grocery stores and drink it while sitting on the curb. And after returning home, he didn't have to dread the 5:45 wake-up alarms.

He didn't have to don a suit and tie, leave his Wrigleyville (one of the most hip and happening neighborhoods in Chicago) apartment at 6:30 a.m., or rush to catch a train for the 45-minute commute to his downtown office. When those requirements defined his days, Todd would return home 12 hours later, too tired to comprehend anything of Sartre, too weary even for "Wheel of Fortune."

Weekends, the only days that Todd says "were left to be lived" weren't much better; he used them to recover from one exhausted Monday-through-Friday routine and get ready for another. "Nobody in today's corporate world works 40-hour weeks," Todd adds with a careless laugh. Because of the distance in time and space, he apparently feels safe beyond the corporate reach.

But, over four years ago, when the corporations wooed him during his senior year at the University of Illinois at Champaign, he didn't resist. Invited to 30 interviews, Todd chose five. He accepted the Amoco offer with a starting salary of $30,000.

Two years from now, once he's acquired the Ph.D., he can expect to earn about the same -- if he's lucky enough to land a college teaching position. According to his research, two qualified candidates apply for each opening in liberal arts departments across the country. Todd knows that, when he graduates from the University of Iowa, he will not be bombarded with 30 invitations for interviews. He also realizes he may end up teaching in Alaska, Florida, or some remote place in between. He seems reconciled to that.

Todd's father speaks about his son with only slightly muffled pride. A banker in the central Illinois community of Tuscola, he and his wife, a teacher's aide at a local elementary school, have seven children. According to him, Todd has shown signs of above-average intelligence and curiosity since early childhood.

"Knowing how much he always enjoyed learning and studying, we knew he would be happy back at school. And although philosophy seemed a little of a deviation from computer science, we encouraged him. Emotionally, at least," he adds with a laugh. "We knew he had thought it out. Todd doesn't make rush decisions; he is not that kind of person. We were concerned with his long-term financial future, but he convinced us that even if he decided to go back to computer science, the advanced degree in philosophy would be a big feather in his cap. So we are cheering him on."

And so are the professors in the UI's Department of Philosophy. "Among our 40-odd graduate students, Todd is the only one with such a drastically different background," says Professor Laird Addis, director of graduate studies. "But his professional experience is definitely an asset, not an obstacle. In admitting candidates to our program, we look so much at the potential revealed by the GRE scores that we don't always attach very much significance to the philosophy background."

Todd also has the full support of his girlfriend, Karen. Although she still works in Chicago as a systems analyst for Amoco, she is in the process of applying to law schools and may end up joining him at the UI. Then Todd won't spend his weekends traveling to Chicago to see her.

During the week, he devotes his extra time to the American Civil Liberties Union. A member for five years, he's glad his present schedule leaves room for involvement in something he feels is so politically and socially important.

And the lack of a vibrant social life in Iowa City is not a minus. It allows Todd to focus on his favorite philosophical reading. "Many of the graduate students here, in contrast to the young employees at Amoco, have settled lives," he says. "Wives, children, and other family responsibilities are not conducive to frequent social events." And that's fine with Todd. He sees his old friends from the corporation on some weekends, but -- unlike them -- doesn't dread Sunday nights or what follows the next morning.

"The change I made has paid off," Todd says. "I enjoy my work so much that I love coming to the office."

 

Forty-one-year-old "Sarah," who spoke on the condition of anonymity, shares the same confidence in rediscovering herself. Always an artist at heart, she has painted the canvas of her life with sweeping strokes and vibrant colors, and the landscape of her experience extends across the country -- from Los Angeles to New York.

Today, at home in the Iowa countryside, she is finishing her graduate work at the UI's poetry workshop, a component of the renowned Writers' Workshop. But, more than 15 years ago, she was trapped in the metropolitan maze of L.A., a fresh J.D. diploma in her pocket. Day after day, she put on a designer suit, a dimmed smile, and a professional attitude as she plowed through libraries in preparation for her cases. Simultaneously and unceasingly, doubts burrowed into her consciousness; for the life of her, Sarah couldn't figure out why she had chosen law or how she could make it her life's work.

After a few years of inner struggle, she escaped the labyrinths of law and the straits of the urban jungle. She completed the transition West Coast-style -- through a Malibu bookstore, self-searching trips to the Grand Canyon, and a cottage in New Mexico.

It wasn't the first time Sarah chose to redirect her life. A bright and beautiful high school graduate, her cheekbones as high as her artistic aspirations, she decided to study art at the University of Southern California. Then she transferred to the University of Colorado, only to go back to L.A. and drop out of school. She returned to the academy with a resolve to major in classics. "I didn't quite want to teach this, but I wanted to graduate and figure out what to do," she explains. "Then I made up my mind that I didn't want a career in Latin or Greek and went to the Pepperdine law school in Malibu."

It wasn't long before Sarah was practicing law, buying a new suit every lunch hour, and seriously considering purchasing a BMW.

"I was fortunate to get a job in a terrible law firm," she says. "It was a corrupted sweat house, teeming with backstabbing, fraud, sexual harrassment -- even though I had no idea what that was back then. I walked away from it on my 30th birthday, with no place to go."

She ended up at Pepperdine once more, teaching legal research, writing, and banking, and nursing a futile hope that her halfway withdrawal from the law would prove a solution. It didn't.

Through the study of Jungian analysis, Sarah arrived at the conclusion that one cannot be happy without a creative pursuit, that people born to be poets -- such as herself -- are a special breed inhabiting the outer fringes of life, partaking of the prophetic. Climbing up a narrow ledge on a hiking trip with a couple of friends in Colorado, Sarah knew she would quit teaching law when someone asked why she didn't just leave if she were so unhappy. She tripped and almost fell off the ledge.

After returning from the mountains, Sarah started free falling. First, from the hefty five-figure income she enjoyed to a five-dollars-an-hour job at a bookstore. Then she fell for the Grand Canyon (according to Sarah, the best place for life-changing meditation), and then for New Mexico -- its poor artists, still poorer Indians, its otherworldly feel. The only child of well-to-do parents, she persuaded them to give her an advance on her future inheritance and bought a house on the outskirts of a small town in the northern part of the state. She plans to return to her New Mexico refuge this summer with her four cats and two dogs.

"I can live in the country or in New York City," she says, "nowhere in between. Iowa City is like a suburb -- too many people for comfort, too few to feel energized."

These days she feels energized mostly because her first book of poems is scheduled for publication this autumn. She remembers that even when she was still employed by "the firm" and in the middle of preparing some legal documents behind closed doors, she would catch herself writing poetry.

"I tried all kinds of writing," she says, "but for some reason everything that comes out from my pen is poetry." She admits that her single verses and whole poems tend to be long and winding, causing arguments between her and her editors.

After the book comes out, Sarah hopes to receive a grant or two, complete another book, return to editing a literary review she started in New Mexico a few years back, and possibly -- in a more distant future -- teach creative writing. She has no desire to go back to L.A., where "life seems a constant fight for more opportunities to make more money," she says.

But Sarah thinks it takes time to find yourself in life. In her opinion, many people pursue the arts too early in life, when instead of being creative, they can only imitate. Her advice: "When you plan your life, take a year off."

Kevin Kopelson, 35, obviously didn't hear that advice. He rushed his way through school and a couple careers without staring into the prophetic depths of the Grand Canyon, without assessing things from the perspective of the Continental Divide. By the time most kids graduate from high school, this New York native had graduated from college; by the time others graduated from college, he had completed law school; and by the time most young lawyers start frowning at the world of academia through the windshields of their new BMWs, he had taken to literature and literary criticism.

Kevin Kopelson

Now an assistant professor of English at the UI, Kevin arrived at the English Philosophy Building via the Julliard School of Music, Yale University, the law school at Columbia University, and a Ph.D. program at Brown University.

Graduating from Julliard at 16 and Yale's music school at 19, he knew he didn't enjoy solo performances enough to endure them throughout his entire life. He was also aware of the fact that his technique was not brilliant enough to make him the virtuoso of his generation. He didn't know what else to do, so he went straight to law school, believing he would enjoy it more than he could the career of a concert pianist too painfully familiar with his own limiations.

Law school was a disappointment from the very beginning, but Kevin kept plowing through the classes and exams for what he now calls perverse reasons. "I wanted to prove to myself and others that I could graduate and enjoy it," he says, a shadow of sadness lingering in his voice.

"During the first year of law school, you hear, 'These are just the pains of initiation -- wait 'til the second,'" remembers Kevin. "In the second, you hear, "This is a crisis year -- wait 'til the third.' During the third, the line is that the true fun will start once you graduate and begin to practice. In the first year of practice, they tell you you have to pay rookie dues, and so on. An illusion that turns into a trap.

"Law schools encourage not creativity, but analytical thought, and most of the students don't have the calling; they get into law by default because they don't know what else to get into. Some of them say, 'Just let me practice, and I'll enjoy it.'"

Kevin tried to enjoy it in one of Manhattan's top law firms. But his hope quickly faded into a four-year-long struggle. Ultimately, he decided to return to academia.

He admits the resolution was more a relief than a challenge, easy to make because he never really learned how to live an ostentatious yuppie lifestyle, never devloped a strong affinity for fancy apartments, restaurants, cars, clothes, or vacations. But he understands why materialistic attachments develop and how they hold many lawyers in the tight grip of a career some of them loathe.

However, Kevin also remembers quite a few coworkers who abandoned law and took a leap of faith into classics or history, fields promising much lower probability of gainful employment in the academy than English.

At Brown, he used his savings to put himself though the first year of a doctoral program before he was offered a teaching assistantship. Throughout the course of his studies, he had to weather his parents' well-intentioned letters inspired by clips on liberal arts Ph.D.s turning cabbies by the dozens. Their fears proved exaggerated when Kevin was offered not one but several faculty positions. He chose Iowa because he believes it provides an environment conducive to the pursuit of his own interests.

Professor Kopelson specializes in 20th century British literature, literary theory, and "queer" (lesbian and gay) theory. From his first book, Love's Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics (Stanford University Press, 1994), he chose a quotation that could be a motto for his life: "Gender may well be the template of alterity, but it is a remarkably malleable one."

Asked about the connection between his gay sexuality and his career transitions, he says, "I felt averse to entering law school because I thought it represented 'normal' life. I was very unhappy as a lawyer partially because I felt that my sexuality precluded me from success. I experienced a variety of problems."

It is no surprise, then, that the seven years he devoted to law are nothing but a "kind of blackout with more than a few repressed memories."

But in Iowa City's trendy Java House, surrounded by the morning crowd, Kevin doesn't look like someone wrestling with bad memories. In his niche at a corner table, a bowl-like cup of coffee and a thick book in front of him, he seems as comfortable and confident as he says he feels in his vocation. The evenly measured, natural tones of his voice, his focused eyes, his relaxed hands -- all compose a picture of a man who has found himself, his element, and an effective way to deal with his mistakes. "I regret that I felt compelled to choose a career before being capable of making an informed choice," he says.

If he had to be something other than a university professor, Kevin would choose to be a nonfiction writer. (His second book, Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire, will be published in the next year, and he is already working on a third.) And, if he couldn't be a nonfiction writer?

"Well, I don't know. Maybe a model -- or a florist," he says, laughing. "Returning to law would not be my first choice, and I would only consider public interest law. I could only represent people and issues I support."

 

Talented and smart, Todd, Sarah, and Kevin could be top players in a number of professional arenas. They all found success in their early careers, as well as a sense of confusion and malaise at their own unhappiness. Could it be that our social and educational systems pressure young people to plot their career paths too early in life?

Freed now from the "good jobs" they had, these three pay the price of substantially reduced income and increased solitude. Once part of a corporate social structure, they have given up teamwork for the relatively solitary pursuits of writing and academic work. Each of them combats the loneliness with a commitment that puts them in touch with others. For Todd, it's his work with the ACLU; for Sarah, it's the people she works with in literary publishing; and for Kevin, it's queer theory and issues.

Do they harbor regrets at the choices they made to veer off the high-speed highway to success?

"What regrets?" asks Sarah indignantly. "I'm not going to have regrets. I'm not buying into this. Life is a work of art. Mine has been painful, but wonderful, a complete struggle, but in a good sense. Yes, I would have had regrets had I never come to poetry, but not now."

Kevin regrets the seven years he spent studying and practicing law, but not a single minute of Julliard, Yale, Brown, or Iowa. He still forces himself to learn new music and practices the piano daily.

Todd knows that if he cannot find a teaching job when he completes his doctorate, he can always return to the computer world, where both his liberal arts Ph.D. and his previous experience would be an asset.

But none of these people is looking for something to fall back on; they are all too busy looking ahead.