Begin with Passion

A conversation with Mitchell B. Reiss, President, Washington College, Chestertown, MD for Reform Judaism

What is the best advice you can give a high school student who's deciding on a college and a career?
You're not going to be very successful or very happy unless you're really enthusiastic about what you're doing.

If you don't yet know where your passion lies, take a cue from the French, who have the expression, "The appetite comes with the eating." In other words, in higher education you can sometimes find your passion by taking a variety of different courses. This is one of the great advantages of a liberal arts education: it allows you to try different courses and see if you might like something you don't imagine you would.

Finding your purpose in life is what a great undergraduate experience is all about. The best colleges help students find that passion. I believe a liberal arts institution can do this better than any other model on the planet.

About a third of young people are getting jobs in industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. How do you educate students for jobs that don't yet exist?
You teach them transcendent skill sets, the most important of which is how to think critically, dissect, and analyze situations. Communicating effectively both in writing and in speech is another essential skill we emphasize. We also stress that possessing these skills is necessary but not sufficient; students also need to develop the moral courage to speak up when they believe something is wrong. Take some of the great mistakes over the last decade-the BP oil disaster, the Penn State sex scandal, the presumption of WMDs in Iraq-in each instance, individuals knew that something wasn't right or that misstatements were being made, but nobody spoke up and it led to disaster. In teaching the importance of ethics, integrity, and character, we hope that our graduates will go out into the world with the discernment to make judgments for themselves and the moral courage to act on them by speaking up even when it's unpopular to do so.

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