October 22 2023
October 22, 2023
# 1625
Will Khan
Gen Z on the road to fulfillment
Navigating Careers as a College Student
Most college students, including myself, try to find the perfect job too early in their career search. You’ve only been a student until now, so don’t try to be certain about your future career.
Figuring out a career is the same deal. Start early and treat the process as an exploration. You should consider every opportunity that comes your way, take every conversation to learn more about a certain field, and prioritize completing applications over submitting perfect applications. (Quality over quantity.) I’ve listed below a couple of resources to lean on and how to use them effectively, along with some general pieces of advice on the application process that I still find helpful in my professional development.
Career Services - I’m biased, given that I worked in my school’s career services department. However, I would say this is the best place to start to figure out what you want to do. You can sift through the resources on your career services website; there’s plenty of material that describes the vast number of fields out there, types of jobs available, and general application timelines for those industries. Schedule time to speak with a career counselor, and approach the conversation with an open mind. Career services can point you towards recruiting events on campus, networking contacts that you can reach out to, and most importantly, resume and interview help.
Alumni - Networking (unfortunately) is everything. I received a flat-out rejection from every job I applied to where I didn’t have a connection with an employee there. Most industries are not as extreme (the financial sector is notorious for this), but I remember that I received interviews on every internship where I applied after speaking with an alum, or a connection of an alum, at that company. You should meet as many professionals as you can, not only to increase your prospects of landing an internship, but also because you gain insider knowledge into their field. Sure, sometimes you won’t receive a response. However, more often than not, alumni and professionals want to help you, most of all because they love talking about themselves and what they do. Feed into that, and go into every conversation prepared with thoughtful questions and listen carefully. After, write down notes so you remember what the conversation was about. Following back up is really important, and remembering your conversations shows people that you care and makes you stand out more. Think about how you would feel if a random acquaintance remembered your birthday!
Students/Clubs - Upperclassmen who have already gone through the internship experience are also often more willing than not to share their experience and advice with you. Plus, your peers will be the most brutally honest about any internship they completed and help inform your decision more. Interest clubs run by these upperclassmen are also a great place to find out more detailed information about a certain industry. Clubs will often bring in alumni speakers, and offer interview prep that is catered to that industry.
After you’ve begun to take full advantage of these resources, the next step is actually figuring out where to apply. Chase every opportunity that presents itself. Apply to companies where you can seek out a helpful alum. Get the internship/job offers first and put yourself in a position where you have choice.
I knew I ultimately wanted to end up in the financial sector. I spoke to nearly 50 different Swarthmore alumni, who in turn pointed me to about another ~20 people. I ended up applying to around 20 companies, nine of which I had an alumni connection. These internships covered a vast number of different departments that you would find at a bank; I did not constrain myself. I received offers to interview at 10 companies, each of which involved a process of an automated hirevue (webcam) interview, multiple phone interviews, and superdays that consisted of four to six 30-minute interviews. I was rejected from 2 jobs, but I immediately took my first offer at Morgan Stanley. I loved the interview process there, and felt that I really clicked with everyone that I interviewed with.
I remember being incredibly happy, as if a giant weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Career development on top of a busy college course schedule is stressful, and so when I received an offer that I loved, I took the rest of the day off and gave myself some time, just for me. My friends and family were ecstatic because they knew how hard I had worked and loved to see that it had paid off. The same can happen for any college grad that puts in the work and commits to keeping an open mind.
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Commentary
In the 1950s we had great concerns about the bomb, civil rights, the Korean War, and McCarthyism among others.
In the coming decades we’ve faced many other issues: the War in Vietnam, and the September 11 attacks in 2011.
Recently, we faced the Covid-19 pandemic (which is far from over), more extreme climate changes (getting more obvious daily), dangerous wars in Ukraine and Israel, and, most disturbing of all, the right-wing extremism, nascent Nazism, actually, in the Republican Party.
This is not the world I hoped to leave to my children. And yet, it is the world they are inheriting. And so I am delighted to see our Gen Z corner growing, even dominating the zine. I so hope it will continue to thrive.
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Kat’s Gen Z Corner
Hoping for Humanity
I was president of the Swarthmore student body when
…a student group brought BDS to campus. Our student government was quickly forced to weigh in on one of the most complicated and devastating conflicts in the Middle East, which made me deeply uncomfortable. The following semester, I signed up for the college's course on the Israel Palestine conflict, which brought me into the region for ten of the most educational and difficult days of my life.
The course was led by Sa'ed Atshan, a gay Palestinian professor who welcomed all voices into the class, which, given the subject matter, was known to get emotional and testy. He danced around the political minefield with incredible grace and always remained quiet on his personal opinions. However, now that we are witnessing the worst tragedies in the region's recent history, he's rightfully no longer remaining quiet. He recently spoke to NBC and wrote an op-ed on the war, which I encourage all to read: "I Wish Americans Could See the Humanity of Palestinians as They Do With Israelis."
I've not been as consumed by an international conflict like this in my entire life. I've cried every day, sometimes multiple times a day, reading about the horror Israeli civilians endured last week — and the millions of innocent Palestinians whose lives and livelihoods are currently being decimated. Hamas, a terrorist group that the vast majority of Palestinians have rejected, has handed Netanyahu the international legitimacy to completely destroy Gaza, a six-mile-wide strip of land home to 2 million Palestinians.
What the media is failing to properly cover is that in Gaza, there are no bomb shelters. There is no Iron Dome. There are no billions of dollars in support from the United States. There is not even an exit. If Israel invades or continues to cut off food, water, and humanitarian aid, the world will have allowed one of the worst human rights tragedies of my lifetime. We have learned nothing. And all I can do is doomscroll The New York Timeslive war updates from my office in Manhattan and cry.
PHOTO: Nelson Mandela quote on the Apartheid Wall in Israel Palestine. I took this photo.
[I asked Howard, my friend of many years—well over 50—to respond if he would to Kat’s column this week. This adds to the long list of contributions he has made to the blog, and now the ‘zine. Here’s the email he sent, verbatim]
Dom,
I won’t answer, though I suppose I could just by dint of invoking my inalienable genealogy, as a “Jewish man.” I don’t identify, or at least I consciously am indisposed to do so, as anything but what, at a deeper level of meaning is ineradicable: I call myself human.
The world generally is in a state, tracking the streams of grim factors that threaten all humans, on the verge of the ultimate catastrophe of extinction of life as we have known it for a relatively brief period in the full history thus far of the planet we call home. I mean human life (in addition to all the species of life that have been extinguished just during the ascendancy of human beings among literally millions of species since the planet has cooled sufficiently to support life as we define it scientifically).
For all of whatever progress we make, though it seems mainly one step forward and three back (to be grossly simplistic) the media are filled with ceaseless narratives of man-made mayhem, gore, and brutality.
In this, I empathize fully with Kat, with a special poignancy mixed with a faint glimmer of hope, given that she is of a generation two removes from ours. Ours, of course, is the elder generation, about to cede whatever dubious hegemony we’ve stewarded during our lifetimes. Once again, a prevalent generation has blown its opportunity to begin to make things so obviously wrong better.
Some things are better of course, and we should not forget this. However the days of stupefying overwhelming numbers of victims of evildoers raining death and destruction may seem behind us, we nevertheless see the seeds of the same malign behavior germinating in countless numbers of locations with the rank soil of hatred, bigotry, and delusion to fertilize them. We may never have another world war (or who knows?), but we seem bent on doing it piecemeal, if not by proxy as well.
As for what is happening in the Middle East, I am of sufficient age to say all occurred recently enough to be exceeded by my age. The current horrific turn of events, adds to all the others since 1948, as the latest phase of the disorder and suffering that has prevailed in that region for millennia—let us remember Christ was born there, in the middle of an era when an irresistible imperial power had the region under its heel while it subjugated the indigenous peoples there. I remember the history of Palestine and the state of Israel with a particular perspective.
Indeed, taking just a step or two back for an even broader view, we see that Jews and Arabs alike have an even longer history and a grief-laden familiarity with the impact and artifacts of being forced into exile (the condition that prevails among the belligerents as the chief complaint on both sides as both justification and provocation for legitimacy of the “cause” on either side).
As happens more and more, I cede the floor briefly to ChatGPT for a concise sense of the history, one side coextensive of the other, of dispersion of BOTH the Arab and Jewish peoples. And I remind the reader that to review just these “facts” is to be overly reductive and at the same time only to hint at the complexity and interwoven strands that must be disentangled before we can begin to find a rationale and humane solution.
And in those qualifiers, rational and human, I find the common cause I share with your daughter. But first we must put aside labels and then put aside biased reporting, and then cease broadcasting ideology driven and only partial accounts of what is happening and what has happened. Then we can begin, to invoke Kat’s theme, to “learn.”
And so, of course, I endorse all of what Kat has said and implied in her heartfelt expression of grief and dismay. All any human wants ultimately is the safety and comfort of a secure home. At bottom, that’s what at issue in this ceaseless conflict as well.
And now a little history:
The history of diasporas involving peoples with ethnic, religious, or cultural affinities over the past two thousand years is rich and complex. Among the major diasporas, the experiences of the Arab and Jewish peoples are notable. It's important to note that the terms "Hamite" and "Semitic" are somewhat outdated and considered problematic in contemporary scholarship due to their associations with racial theories. Instead, we can refer to specific ethnic and cultural groups within these broader categories.
1. Jewish Diaspora:
- Babylonian Exile (586-538 BCE): The Babylonian captivity, also known as the Babylonian exile, was a significant diaspora in Jewish history. The Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple, and exiled a substantial portion of the Jewish population to Babylon.
- Roman Diaspora (1st century CE onwards): The Jewish-Roman Wars resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the dispersion of Jewish communities across the Roman Empire and beyond. The Jewish diaspora has been ongoing for centuries and is characterized by various waves of migration.
- Medieval European Diaspora: Jews faced persecution and expulsion from various European countries during the Middle Ages. They settled in different regions, leading to the development of distinct Jewish communities, such as Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe and Sephardic Jews in Spain and Portugal.
- Holocaust and Post-World War II Diaspora: The Holocaust during World War II resulted in the loss of millions of Jewish lives. Survivors and their descendants dispersed globally, with significant communities in Israel, the United States, and other countries.
2. Arab Diaspora:
- Islamic Expansion (7th-8th centuries): The early Islamic conquests led to the rapid spread of Arab culture and language across vast territories, including North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe and Asia. This expansion resulted in the Arabization of many regions.
- Trans-Saharan and Trans-Indian Ocean Trade Routes: Arab merchants and traders established communities along trade routes, facilitating cultural exchanges and migrations between the Arabian Peninsula, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
- Modern Arab Diaspora: In the 19th and 20th centuries, economic and political factors led to significant Arab migration to the Americas, Europe, and other parts of the world. Palestinian and Syrian diasporas, in particular, have been shaped by conflicts in the Middle East.
It's important to recognize that both the Jewish and Arab diasporas have complex and diverse histories, with migrations driven by various factors, including economic opportunities, persecution, religious motivations, and political conflicts. Additionally, the concept of Hamitic and Semitic branches is not widely used in contemporary scholarship because it oversimplifies the diverse cultural and ethnic groups that make up these broader categories. Scholars prefer to use more specific terms to describe these groups and their histories.(1)
ChatGPT, prompt "What, historically, are the major diasporas of peoples with ethnic, religious, or cultural affinities during the course of the past two thousand years? I am especially interested in those forced migrations that are woven into the history of the peoples who identify as Arab and Jewish in their ancestral descent, and accounting for what may be, inexactly, associated with so-called Hamite and Semite branches of the original Old Testament accounts.", October 17, 2023, OpenAI, https://chat.openai.com.
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Do You Believe in Magic? Anthology of Stories from the North End
Edited by Dom Capossela
Sixty stories recollecting incidents of our youth in Boston’s Italian North End in the three decades, 1950-1970. Notice the editor.
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Tucker’s Corner
The movies are a dangerous place to be this weekend. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour film is upon us. People have been sharing videos of people singing and dancing and acting like maniacs in the theater during the film as if they were front row at the most coveted concert tour in living memory. Many have been condemning Swift’s fans for acting this way in a theater but I want to go on record in their defense. I approve. Dance and sing your hearts out. The world is an ever more terrifying place by the minute it seems. If you’ve got a reason to dance and sing and feel happiness please do so. I am not a Swiftie so I’m avoiding the theater this weekend (though my mother is a HUGE fan so I might wind up at the theater next weekend anyway. ) Instead I stayed home and my wife and I binge watched the final season of one of our favorite show’s. A show maintaining a coherent and interesting vision throughout its run is something worth celebrating as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t dance and sing about it but I wrote this piece in the hope that a few more people might fall in love the way I did. This is Reservation Dogs.
Reservation Dogs - Created by Sterlin Harjo
In the last episode of Reservation Dogs’ third and final season, an Indigenous teenage girl visits her aunt in prison. The girl, named Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) buys an armful of vending machine snacks for Hokti (Lily Gladstone) and breaks the sad news that the medicine man she has been studying with, Fixico (Richard Ray Whitman) has passed away. Hokti consoles Willie Jack and using a bag of chips as a visual aid, explains that he isn’t exactly gone. Hokti places a chip on top of each of the other snacks on the table explaining that each one represents something Fixico taught each person he knew and that those same people will take that knowledge and share it with others. “It’s how community works,” Hokti says. “It’s sprawling. It spreads. What do you think they came for when they tried to get rid of us? Our community. You break that and you break the individual.”
It was in that moment that I realized that’s what Reservation Dogs has always been working toward. What began as a dark comedy about four Indigenous teens on an Oklahoma reservation scheming and stealing to realize their dead friend Daniel’s dream of moving to California, has evolved over three seasons to become a celebration of the community that raised them. Sterlin Harjo the show’s creator, made a point to show that life on a reservation isn’t easy. Daniel died by suicide. Hokti, Daniel’s mother, was put in prison in no small part due to prejudice against her race. Poverty runs rampant and opportunities are few. But Harjo and his incredible team of Native actors, writers, and directors show us that it’s also a place where familial bonds transcend traditional definitions of family.
Reservation Dogs started (only 2 years ago) with Willie Jack and her best friends, Elora (Devery Jacobs), Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), and Cheese (Lane Factor) stealing a delivery truck and selling it to a scrapyard for quick cash. The ineptitude of the whole affair makes this first episode hysterical but the idea of a show about teen criminals quickly fades. After all the kids aren’t criminals. They’re just desperate for money and adventure but also in search of a way to end their grief at Daniel’s passing. Elora, the oldest and most restless of the friend group is the first to leave but learns that without her friends the trip isn’t worth doing.
As the show progresses all the Rez Dogs grow up in their own way. Bear, who once idolized his absentee father Punkin, learns to be a better man than he. Elora discovers college might actually be a better path to leaving the reservation than running away. Willie Jack learns that leaving may not be her path at all and finds her purpose on the reservation. Cheese, the sweetest and most intellectual of the group, loses his custodial uncle to prison and is raised first in a group home and then by a grandmother who isn’t actually related to him. But rather than rage against this fact he comes to value the “it takes a village” approach to his upbringing and learns to treasure it. It was at this point that I took a step back on the series and realized each of the kids had a similar experience. Elora’s single mother died in a motorcycle accident and so was raised by her grandmother Mabel. Bear works with Daniel’s father and as a roofer and this proximity to a man who lost his son allows for them both to live out a father son relationship even if they aren’t relatives.
The kids are a perfect window into this community because they unwittingly need so much from it. They absorb the knowledge and care (and lessons from mistakes) of their loving, flawed elders. They discover what’s special about a place they couldn’t’ wait to leave when the show began. At one point in the series, they do finally make their pilgrimage to California and after all seeing the ocean for the first time are able to let Daniel’s memory stop haunting them. It’s as if finally making the journey made them realize they didn’t have to escape their home permanently. They all just had their own demons to exorcize. Speaking personally, I knew very little about Native American culture and reservation life when I began this series, and it was a distinct pleasure to learn about this way of life right along with the main characters.
As Willie Jack and Hokti's conversation suggests, community in Okern extends beyond the living. Not only do the dead persist in characters' memories; they also resurface on Earth to support their corporeal kin. During an earlier prison visit, Willie Jack and Hokti pray together, surrounded by a legion of ancestral healers. An emotional episode from the current season finds Cookie returning to help Bear’s mother decide whether to take a promotion that will mean moving to Oklahoma City. In the series finale, Bear bids farewell to the spirit who first appeared to him in the premiere. Like Bear's honorary uncles, the spirit has taught him how to be a part of this community: “I learned that I don't need to be the only leader.”
Reservation Dogs is an astounding feat of compression. In his keen awareness of how rare it is to see any Native stories on TV, let alone ones afforded such creative freedom, Harjo squeezes every last drop of representation out of the series' 14-ish hours of screen time. Most shows that attempt what Rez Dogs accomplishes would've felt overcrowded, between the dozens-strong cast of characters and the historical weight of Indigenous experience in America. The series jumps genres often and always does so with purpose. They need to change the angle you’re seeing these characters from so they can really address their central themes. Death may be the weightiest topic of all, and it hangs over a series that was also, paradoxically, about the infinite possibilities of youth. Daniel's suicide cast a shadow over the first two seasons, until the Rez Dogs reaffirmed their love for each other on the beach in L.A., where his spirit joined them in a final hug. When it was Mabel's time to go, Elora's home filled up with aunties and uncles and friends, there to shepherd her to the next life. Cookie's accident left her daughter aggrieved and other Rez members guilt-ridden but each death brought the community together, too. It makes sense: every story about Native Americans in the 21st century is a story of resilience.
So it's fitting that the finale—a low-key episode by the show's standards—also centers around a funeral. As Fixico's protégée, Willie Jack oversees his burial. Once again, Okern unites around a beloved elder. The women cook a meal to share, the young men dig the grave, and the grandparents sit around busting everyone's chops, as is their right. As Hokti explains to Willie Jack: "The thing about community is, you gotta take care of it. You have to play your part." By listening to elders and passing on their wisdom to the next generation, says Hokti, "we keep going." By depicting its characters' world, without compromise, Reservation Dogs also honors and preserves the embattled communities it represents. Although its remarkable run has come to an end, I have no doubt that it, too, will keep going.
Hey everyone – I got to spend a couple of days fishing on the Klickitat River in the south central part of Washington state not too far from Mount Adams with a great guide and a good friend.
It’s spawning season for steelhead and some salmon species so they come in from the pacific ocean, swim up the Columbia River and then the Klickitat river.
We caught two nice chinook salmon and three pretty steelhead (as well as some rainbows and whitefish) and I was able to capture some of the action on camera.
Here’s an 8-minute video that gives a nice sense of the outing. It was really special, and I was able to include some of the bird life, some interesting parts of the river, and some of our misses along with the catches.
The video will play fine on a phone, but it will be much better on a computer (and make sure you go for 4K using the settings icon for the video).
Enjoy, and I hope you are all well.
Chris
Food
Frutti di mare
for 2
Ingredients:
½ cup Italian olive oil
½ lb squid, bodies and tentacles, fresh
4 cherrystones, steamed, (broth reserved),
shells discarded
1 lb mussels, steamed, (broth reserved),
shells discarded
2 oz lobster tailmeat, cooked
2 diver scallops, fresh
2 large shrimp, fresh
Prepare the protein in the oil:
In a large skillet, heat two tablespoons of the oil at medium heat
Sear the scallops to a deep brown, remove before fully cooked
Add the rest of the oil to the pan and heat
Then fry the other seafood ingredients not already steamed or cooked, stirring gently, until they get the flavor of the oil and they impart their own flavors.
Add in the rest of the seafood, including the scallops, and toss once in the pan.
Remove all the seafood and reserve. Keep the oil, now nicely flavored and fragranced, in the skillet.
Remove the pan from heat until ready to add other ingredients for finishing the sauce.
Make the paste:
6 cloves raw garlic, whole and trimmed
3 oz onion, minced
1/8 t oregano
1/8 t red pepper
salt and pepper to taste
6 large leaves fresh basil
Equal amount of fresh Italian parsley
Put all these ingredients into a food chopper and make a paste.
Put the skillet back on the flame at medium.
Add the paste once the oil is reheated. Spread and flatten the paste evenly in the pan.
Fry in an active simmer for 5 minutes, adjusting the flame as needed.
For the Pasta:
½ lb linguini
1 cup of the reserved shellfish broth, hot
Cook the linguini in boiling salted water in a 6 to 8 cup pan until the pasta bends, but is far from cooked.
Drain the water and replace with the cup of shellfish stock
Finish cooking the pasta in the broth.
For finishing the sauce:
¼ cup white wine
¼ cup shellfish broth
¼ cup fresh basil leaves, coarsely chopped
¼ cup fresh parsley, coarsely chopped
Add all of the ingredients into the oil and stir gently.
Simmer for ten minutes.
Add in all of the reserved cooked seafood and simmer for five minutes.
Serving:
Portion the pasta and then add the sauce.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
"The reason I talk to myself is that I'm the only one whose answers I accept."
George Carlin
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Six Word Stories
"Rainy days, shared umbrella, new beginnings.
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts, including links.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
text to 617.852.7192
This note from dear friend Tommie,
Dom, please share with your gorgeous daughter that apple picking in the fall was a family tradition for years. Our favorite orchards were in NC. We would take a picnic with friends and spend the day in the mountains. We always picked an ample amount to share with our neighbors and Don's business people. Don and I and our friends from Clemson University continued the tradition until health issues ensued.
My favorite fall recipe was to make apple dumplings served with whipped cream or ice cream. Decadent and delicious!
TT
And this reaction from Alexis on seeing her submission in print:
ahhhhhhh!
lex
And this from our firebrand Tommy D:
Hi Dom and Tucker. Great review of Cain Mutiny movie.
Tucker, if you got time, please watch the original with Humphrey Bogart as Caine and Henry Fonda.
Tommy D.
Cremant de Bourgogne
Huber-Verderau, a best buy at $25.00
What a terrific wine> A joy to look at: light gold with billions of tiny bubbles. Smell the strong berry aromas of cranberry and strawberries. This is an eminently quaffable, refined wine, with a strong apple aroma and a soupcon of sweetness. It feels crisp and dry on the palate with a long aftertaste.
The producer’s comment: Quite vinous crémant with its fine bubbles. More than a sparkling wine, it is a wine with character. It can be enjoyed as an aperitif of course and can be continued with the meal. Wine to be consumed in the year for up to 4 or 5 years.
For what it’s worth:
I got my covid booster shot. Four hours later my nose got very runny, a condition that lasted four hours. Others who got the covid booster didn’t fare as well.
For what it’s worth, II:
At a dermatologist’s office a week ago, I underwent a scraping which was then sent out for a biopsy.
I got a report that I should return for a more aggressive scraping.
I asked a friend, a professional in that specific area, about their report and suggested procedure.
His reply:
Nothing to worry about
Superficial type of low grade squamous carcinoma , if you can even call it that
They are non metastasizing.
Needs complete local excision and then you’re done with it
Okay.
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