Transcription of Genevieve Morgan for the show Graduation #143
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Show #143 “Graduation” airing for the first time on Sunday, June 8, 2014. Tis the season for graduations. As the mother of a high school senior, I joined the families and school across the state who are sending this year’s crop of graduates out into the world. What’s next for those who have turn the tassel?
This week we are joined by Genevieve Morgan, Island Port Editor and author of Undecided and former 207 Executive Producer Becki Smith, author of Starting Out: Life Lessons for Graduates, and Tim Sample, a widely acknowledged humorist who is a correspondent for CBS news Sunday Morning where he produced postcards for Maine segments. Thank you for joining us.
For long time listeners, I’m pleased to bring back into the studio a voice that you will find quite familiar. This is my friend and former co-host, Genevieve Morgan. Genevieve is a writer and editor from Portland. She is the author of Undecided, a book that helps post high school grads with the big decisions that affect their education and careers. Her next book, The Fog of Forgetting, book 1 of the Five Stones Trilogy will be released in July. Thanks for being here.
Genevieve: It’s so nice to see you, Lisa.
Lisa: It’s really great to have you back and I was saying to you earlier, I’m so impressed with the work that you’ve done in the time that you’ve been not with us. You’ve been really busy.
Genevieve: I have but I’m so pleased to come back and see all the great things you guys are doing and how well the shows prospered. It seems not that long ago that we were just thinking of doing this show.
Lisa: That’s true. I guess we’re almost 3 years here.
Genevieve: Congratulations.
Lisa: Thank you.
Genevieve: It’s a great thing for Maine and for Portland.
Lisa: For Portland. You’re a great thing for Maine and for Portland because I have your book Undecided: Navigating Life and Learning After High School in my hands. It’s something that I found really interesting to read because you and I both have children in this age range, the range where you’re trying to decide what do I do after high school and is it necessarily college? Tell me why this was an important book for you to write.
Genevieve: First of all I have a junior at Portland High School and a 14 year old coming up into Portland High School. My junior at that point, who was a sophomore last year when I started the book, was not doing very well academically. He seemed fairly unmotivated when it came to school. There was a lot of conversation in our household about whether college being so expensive was the right choice for him right after high school, because as you and I know, in order to go to college now, if you’re going to try and pay full boat, it causes extreme hardship except on the most wealthy people in the country.
If you can’t afford to pay full boat, your kids end up with ruinous debt after they come out of college unless of course they can get scholarships. There are ways around that, but it’s a much more difficult decision now and yet two-thirds of every high school senior wants to go to college. My thinking was what if you don’t get into college? What if you can’t go to college? What if you can’t afford to go to college? What are the options? I started to do some research and luckily my publisher, Zest Books in San Francisco, had already been thinking of doing a book along this topic.
When I spoke to them about it, they were so excited because they felt like it was a necessary topic to cover. I think it’s so important. I learned that there’s so many options for kids right now, so many ways that they can go and college is one of them.
Lisa: You started the book with asking kids to really understand where they are right now and by understanding what their personality is kind of, at least at the time that they’re reading this what their personalities were like, because we all know personalities can change.
Genevieve: Yes and particularly at that age.
Lisa: Yes. Exactly. Talk to me a little bit about that. I know there’s the standard introvert and extrovert, but you have a few other interesting things. You talked about the person who’s maestro for example.
Genevieve: A few areas of the books I’m asking kids to look at. They’re very, very basic. I don’t profess to be an expert in psychology, but I did in my research try to help kids understand where they are at at this moment in time. Some very basic fundamental stuff about their character and their temperament and the first one is introvert or extrovert because it’s a very important thing to know whether you get recharged with the group of people or recharged alone. You can imagine if you’re an introvert and you go to a big party school or you go to a big service program with a ton of kids and you’re never given any time to relax. You’re going to be miserable so that’s just a waste of time.
Then there is something deeper than that, which has to do with how you process information and how you utilize information and also how you are in a group. There are two different very basic categories. I really attribute this to Nicolas Lauer, who is a researcher in this area. Three quarters of us are tribal, we like to have a group around us all the time. A quarter of us are maestros, we march our own drum beat. We don’t necessarily need the validation of a group.
Obviously if you’re a maestro, you might have a little more success or be a little more excited about doing something that doesn’t require the support of your community. You could go off and train tigers and dance in the air or something like that. You might be able to feel a little bit better about if you can self identify it as that, as an adventurer. That doesn’t mean if you’re a tribal person, you’ll be unhappy doing that. It’s just that you might be better off in a program with a bunch of other kids.
Lisa: This is an interesting thing to be thinking about if you’re 15, 16 17, 18 because much of what we know when we’re younger comes from our families and comes from our peers and comes from all these external things. We’re just starting to get to understand ourselves.
Genevieve: Many kids, they want to do what’s right. They want to make the right choice and my point in the book is there really is no wrong choice at this point in your life except the choices that end you in jail, in rehab or in the morgue. Those are the 3 places where I want you to stay away from completely when you’re 16, 17, 18. Other than that, what you really need is a plan. That plan I hope will eventually lead to higher learning because I do think that a college degree really impacts your earning capabilities over the long term. These kids are going to live to be 110, hopefully.
To jump off from being 18 into a life of debt service, steady job, we’re putting a lot of pressure on our kids to do that because of our economic instability, but I wonder what happens to their personhood in that. That’s a very important thing for me and for my children. I know that they will eventually get the education that they need to hold down a good job, but I also want them to have a bold and adventurous experience. If they get a degree at 28, I’m really not that worried about it, honestly. I’m here to tell you. I don’t think they’re going to be that worried about it when they’re 60 and they look back whether they got their degree at 24 or 28.
Lisa: Gen, you describe your own experience as being someone who is sort of, I guess let’s say on the back you say, Genevieve Morgan has made a career out of being undecided.
Genevieve: It’s true.
Lisa: You’ve been a writer, an editor, a producer. You’ve lived in different parts of the country, you’ve written for different magazines, different publications. You’ve written different books. You’re a bit of a free spirit yourself.
Genevieve: I am and yet I have the same fears for my children that everybody has. However, I do think that if I look back at who I was when I was 17, I really wanted to be an actress. That’s all I wanted to do. I was good at school and there was an expectation that I would go to college and I was lucky enough to be applying to college in the late 80’s when it wasn’t so hard to get into. I remember distinctly I was going out with a guy who played in a rock band and I wanted to move to Hoboken and live with him and basically go on auditions. My parents were thrown into just spasms of anxiety over this.
I remember I got into Bowdoin, which one of the reasons why I’m in Maine. I spent half an hour in front of the post office with my matriculation card thinking do I send it in, do I not send it in, do I send it in? The epitome of undecided. I eventually sent it in. The boyfriend dumped me and so I did luckily have a place to go. It turned out to be a great thing. I was able to continue acting. I won the Theater Chair of Bowdoin and I went out to California to become an actress. I got to California, realized I wasn’t going to make any money being an actress and got a job fact checking at a magazine.
As the tides of life happened, I started to write more and that’s where it took me, but it was never a conscious choice. People are really lucky if they have a passion and they can actually say, okay, this is what I really want to do. I really admire those people. I’m not one of them.
Lisa: You talk about that in the book, that there are going to be people and maybe those are not the people who are going to read you book. Some people will say I want to be a doctor. I’ve already decided, I’m going to be a doctor, I’m going to go to medical school so then that kind of dictates where they go to college and what courses they take. It’s a relatively clear path. You suggest that maybe it’s okay to not know what you’re passion is, to take some time to think about it and even if you’ve taken some time to think about it, you still may not know what your passion is. That really is okay. That it’s just a lot of pressure we’re putting on kids these days.
Genevieve: I think so and I think that many of us get into our 40’s and we realize we’ve been living somebody else’s life because we thought we knew what we wanted to do, but we didn’t have the maturity or the insight or self-knowledge to understand that we were actually working with somebody else’s script. I think that’s a reason for a lot of midlife crisis. I’m trying to say to the kids, try to get to know yourself a little better now or if you don’t know yourself, be brave enough to experiment and one of the things that I do really appreciate about college for me and for a lot of my friends and what I want for my own children is that it is a safe place to experiment with very wise people guiding you.
I think it’s a great privilege to be able to go to a good university and throw yourself into the mix and figure out what it is you like and what you don’t like. I wish I could give that gift to everybody. There are a lot of people who can’t afford it and a lot of people who can’t get it. What I really want to get across to those kids is that there are ways to cobble that experience together on your own that will lead you into a crazy bright, shinny future. To not be afraid to take the road less traveled. There are other maps.
College is the best known map, but there are tons of other maps. Even if it’s community college in your own community, travel abroad, international studies. Lots of kids are now looking to go oversees for a year and then they end up at college in Scotland or England or Ireland at, I will say, a third the price. Now, whose to say that that’s not a fabulous path for anybody? I look at your son, Campbell and I’m so impressed by what his choices are. He went to Guatemala right after high school, correct?
Lisa: Yes. Campbell went and spent time with safe passage in Guatemala and he helped to educate children who’s families were at the Guatemala City Dump picking trash.
Genevieve: Right. Bold and adventurous choice and has he regretted it at all?
Lisa: No. As a parent of a then 17 year old, I was very anxious, but you’re absolutely right, he went away, he had been accepted to Bowdoin, he was accepted to Cornell. He went away and spent time with people for whom money was thought of very differently. He came to value money himself very differently. When he came back to the United States, he said, you know, I think I’m going to go to the University of Maine where I have a scholarship. I’m going to go on to be a doctor and also study Spanish because it makes me happy. It was all as a result of being away for a year and spending time in a different culture and getting a completely different perspective.
Genevieve: Then his choices are his own. I think there’s an intangible maturity that comes with that. We’re all saying to ourselves as parents, do I really want to spend 60,000 dollars a year or have my children or myself take out these loans to pay 60,000 dollars a year and have them party and do whatever it is they’re going to do at college. No, I think that’s also a really big part of college. I’m really pro college. I think everybody really should go. I’m not trying to say that, but I do think Campbell’s experience or Doug Drew who’s a guidance counselor over Portland High School, he went to college, got into a great college, had a full scholarship, but he was so burnt out by the time he got there, the effort that it took to get him there.
He spent his freshmen year miserable, he failed his classes, he ended up dropping out and he went on what he calls a self-guided gap year where he pedaled. He biked across the country into the wind. I love this story. At the end of that bike ride, however long it took, he stayed at strangers houses. He put himself out there. At the end of that bike ride, he was ready to go back. Took 18 months. He asked to go back to the college where he’d failed out and he ended up graduating with high honors and is now a guidance counselor for other teens.
There are all those kinds of ways and paths to success. It isn’t just the straight and narrow. That’s what I wanted Undecided to say to the kids out there. To not be afraid. There are many, many, many, many options and many paths and you can cobble a bright future together. You don’t have to just go to a brand name college.
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Lisa: You took the time to put many different case studies in the book. You talked about, I believe the founder of Kinko’s was one of your examples. Then you also spoke with a urologist living in this area.
Genevieve: Yes.
Lisa: An author and you spoke to, actually our audio producer John McCain, who’s also a musician. You spoke with lots of different people who had made great fortunes, had made success in other ways and have these as examples to people, kids who are reading this book.
Genevieve: I wanted to show them the adults in their life and even their teachers had all had a crazy twisted path. When adults speak to them about the future, they want the best for them and this includes teachers, coaches, parents, relatives. Nobody had, I mean, very few people, yes, there are people who had real determination and real desire to achieve in one particular field. I don’t know if there’s ever been any study. Look at yourself, you were very determined to be a doctor, but then halfway though you decided you wanted to open the horizons to alternative medicine.
Everybody is growing, we’re human. I’d make the case that being undecided is the state of being human because even the best of us, I remember my dad said, being adult means that you’re about 70% sure you’ve made the right decision. There’s always that 30% you’re not so sure. I think as parents and teachers, we don’t talk about that 30% with our kids because we want them to feel secure, but nobody is totally 100% secure.
That’s a generalization, but nobody I know is 100% sure they’ve made the right choices. We all do the best we can with what we have and I make the case that the more life experience you have, the more resources you will have eventually to draw upon. I think the most important thing, if I get anything really across is that kids start to understand that it just means doing something. Sitting on the couch and playing video games is not going to take you where you want to go.
Going out and driving a food truck or selling your own silk screen t-shirts at a concert or getting a day job and taking Russian at night online. It may not seem like a lot, but all of those things are going to take you somewhere. Right now with the internet, there just a vast, vast pool of resources for kids to draw on right now and their parents and some of it is covered in Undecided.
Lisa: You do talk about college. You talked about colleges as an option. You also talk about and you mentioned traveling abroad, but you also talked about the military and you also talk about going to work. You talk about international and American service programs. You really are providing resources or at least beginnings of resources that will, as teasers, for people to explore.
Genevieve: That was the most amazing thing. I had no idea how much was out there. Had I known when I was graduating high school, I filled out a questionnaire for my publisher and they said, what would you do differently now? I said, I would definitely take a year off, I would go nanny for a family in the south of France and learn, I spoke French at that point, I would come back take acting lessons, Skype with my newfound friends in France and go to work in a retail job to make money. I had no idea that it would be as easy as it is.
It just means you have to plan for it. You have to make a decision that that’s what you’re going to do and then there’s this wealth of people and experience and programs that will come up behind you to support you. If you have good grades, that does make a difference. For instance, the government has a number of government sponsored internships. There’s a wonderful one through the state department, where you can go and live in a consulate. Anywhere in the world. It’s very competitive so it helps if you have good grades and good recommendations, but that’s a terrific thing to do. Who wouldn’t want to do that and have that on their resume?
That’s just one. There’s another one called Pathways to Success on doleta dot gov for kids who want to learn more of a trade or who want to get an internship. There’s over a thousand different paid internships that guarantee pay from day 1. Some of them are like oil rig workers, but some of them are computer programmings, some of them are pipe fittings, some of them are sound engineering. That’s all through the government. Who knew that that was out there? I didn’t before I started the research.
Lisa: There is the value of work itself. Showing up, applying for a job, getting a job, showing up on daily basis, being responsible, understanding what’s it like to pay your bills and the experience of getting along with people in a non-school environment. The possibility that that could really lend itself to some real life and very valuable experiences.
Genevieve: Work doesn’t have to be paid to get that value out of it. I make a big case for volunteering, either abroad or in your own community or through AmeriCorps VISTA because there’s a lot of need in our country. There’s a lot of need in the world. If you agree to donate your labor, what you get in exchange is education and a lot of responsibility. That can often lead to paid work, eventually. Campbell again, he went down there and he donated his labor and that completely changed his outlook and his horizon.
I think volunteering is a great way to blow the roof off your life. Some programs you do need to pay a stipend. I mean you do need to pay a entry fee. Some of them actually pay you a stipend, it all depends on the program. I highly recommend volunteering for anyone who really has no idea what they want to do because you can do a lot in many different fields.
Lisa: One of the strong points that you made in the book is understanding that what you’re doing when you decide, whatever it is you decide to do is you’re making an investment in what might happen next even though you may not know what the outcome is. In one case, you’re talking about colleges and really understanding that if you pay 16,000 dollars a year, if you pay 56,000 dollars a year, it’s an investment. It’s an investment that may or may not pan out and also requires repayment.
Genevieve: Someone said to me you’ve underestimated the effect going to a brand name college because you go to a brand name college for the networking. Yes, it’s great to have a known name on your diploma, but what it is is you meet all these other high-powered individuals and they’re going to come out and rule the world and you’re going to be friends with them. I think that that’s a paradigm that you and I grew up in. I’m not so sure that’s the paradigm for generation Z. Generation Z is the ultimate social network. Their networking goes far beyond bricks and mortar colleges. I think that working together at Ben and Jerry’s for a summer can be as much of a bonding experience as being in someone’s philosophy class.
I think that the person makes the college, the college doesn’t make the person. I think you can get a terrific education at a trade school, at a community college, at Bowdoin, at Stanford, if you really want to. That goes back to the first part of the book which is who are you, where are you at and what do you really want because that’s the first part of any decision making. That’s what I hope kids can get out of the book. It’s to figure out where they are right now and what kind of experience would best fit them right now. It doesn’t mean that’s going to be who they are in the future, but what’s the next best step?
Lisa: My middle child has decided to go to college next year after thinking she might take a year off after thinking she might go to one college, another college, maybe she would work. She is going to college next year. One of the very difficult but important things that we had to do was to sit down and actually run the numbers together. To say if you, in a weekend, as parents put in this amount this is what college-
Genevieve: Expected family contribution.
Lisa: There is the expected family contribution and then there’s the reality. As parents, they may expect that we can put in this amount, but what we have is X. That means that anything that’s additional, you as the rising college student, you are going to have to find a way to pay for this. This is what it’s going to mean. There are all kinds of calculators online that say that if you are going to take out a loan of this many dollars, this means that it’s going to be this amount of a payment per month and you’re going to need this amount of income in order to do that. I think it was frightening and eye opening, but also very grounding for my child to have this conversation. It’s not a conversation that I think parents find very comfortable.
Genevieve: No, and it’s also very obfuscated because the cost of college and tuition, the standard we look it up online and there’s a certain number, but when it comes to what you, your kid and your family will actually have to pay, different colleges may give different packages. I do think there’s a value proposition in that conversation. If you end up, let’s say, you as a family have 10,000 dollars to give towards your kid’s education, what does that mean? How much debt are they going to have when they graduate? I think also, too, that we tend to forget that tuition debt is on top of credit card debt and all sorts of other debt that can make it hard to get a mortgage, hard to do basically do all the things that we want our kids to do.
If you have that 10,000 dollars, would that be better spent going to school in Canada or Ireland and having your child come out debt free? Possibly. If he feels confident that there are other options you can really look at the opportunity cost of that money. I don’t think it’s a bad conversation to have with your children and for them to understand that if they do go to a particular college and it is going to cost them a lot of money, then they better be serious about it. They better do the work and if they can’t do the work, then they need to let people know that they can’t do the work and they can defer for a year or take a year off. Work for a year before they go and make money, before they go in.
No college that I talk to dings students for taking a year off in between high school and college. In fact, they love it. They love gap years. There’s been a lot of research, a lot of data coming out about gap years. The Dean of Admissions from Middlebury ran a study a few years ago and he actually said that the kids coming back from a gap year, or the entering freshmen who had a gap year had an average of 1 to 1.5 rise in their GPA. Colleges like mature kids. They don’t want to waste money or time either. What did she decide? I’m interested.
Lisa: She has decided that she is going to go for the smaller liberal arts college, which is going to be quite a lot more than the state school. She’s decided that she is willing to accept the contributions that our family can make and she is willing to accept the loans. It’s a big and heavy thing as an 18 year old, but this is what she’s decided to do and I completely support her in that.
Genevieve: Again, that’s where she’s at and that’s an empowering thing for her because those decisions are hers and so that debt, she’ll be able to own that debt and hopefully when she graduates, have a degree or a network where she can get a good paying job. There are great paying salaries out there. I don’t want kids to be afraid. I feel like there’s a lot of bad news around this time with all the college admissions. You turn on the radio and it’s just all bad news. I’m here to say, it doesn’t have to be bad news.
Lisa: Speaking of not bad news, in fact, very good news, you have The Fog of Forgetting, book one of the Five Stones Trilogy coming out not too far away. Not too long from now. I can’t wait to read it. It’s not much like your Undecided book or really any other books that you have written.
Genevieve: No. It’s my first work of fiction. In a funny way though, I was thinking about this. I started the Trilogy a few years ago and it actually does relate to Undecided because it is about finding the landscape of your heart. It’s a young adult book. Young adult trilogy. It has 5 characters and they all are searching for something. I didn’t really realize that until recently that the books were related, but my message is somewhat similar in both books. Although The Fog of Forgetting has a lot more action and sword play. It’s a great book. I’m so excited to have it out there. You can actually pre-order it on Amazon.
Lisa: Did it help that you have 2 boys when it comes to the whole sword play thing?
Genevieve: Yeah. Very much, very much. They got to act it out with me. It really helped. They’ve read it and approved of it. They were younger when I started it, but I think the core reader will be maybe 10 to 14 years old. You can read The Fog of Forgetting and the Five Stones Trilogy and then move on to Undecided and contact me at GA hyphen morgan dot com because I’d love to hear your stories. Any teen who’s listening to this, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about and what you’re deciding to do.
Lisa: Very good. I do encourage people. I read Undecided myself. I got a lot out of it as the parent of 2 children who are now college age and another child who will be college age in fairly short order. Read Undecided, get The Fog of Forgetting, book one of the Five Stones Trilogy. Get in touch with Genevieve Morgan, my friend and former producer of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. As we said, Genevieve is a writer and editor from Portland. The author of Undecided and the upcoming Trilogy, the Five Stones Trilogy. Thanks for coming in and thanks for doing the work that you did to bring this information into the world.
Genevieve: Thank you so much, Lisa.