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Faith helps Newberg student deal with slim job prospects

Higher ed — Student says he is thankful he doesn’t graduate from college until next year as he learns that connections are key for jobs

By: Laurent Bonczijk (The Newberg Graphic)
Published: 8/25/2010 12:00:00 PM newberggraphic.com

A Newberg student attending college in Hillsdale, Mich., is glad he is not looking for work this year and thanks to his faith he’s not stressed out about it.

Ben Shelton, a 2007 Veritas graduate who’s entering his senior year in political science at Hillsdale College, said that during his semester off-campus in Washington, D.C., this spring, jobs were a hot topic.

“This spring in D.C. everyone around me was looking for jobs,” Shelton said as he was taking advantage of a Hillsdale program that allows students to pursue “whatever internships we’re interested in.”

Shelton said he thought that in the hunt for jobs one’s qualifications would be enough. What he learned is that connections are most important. He interned at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in part thanks to the agency’s connection with his college. This in turn helped him land an internship at the Cascade Policy Institute, an Oregon free-market think tank.

Both gigs allowed him to concentrate on writing persuasively, a task he enjoys, although “it doesn’t come easy to me,” he said. He strives to write in an approachable way to convince people in the short space he’s allowed, because if an idea is true, it should hold true with the larger community, he said.

While he’s majoring in political science and has worked for two institutions with strong partisan viewpoints, “(I) wrestle with how far I want to thread in applied politics,” he said, “I think I want to be a part of asking good questions instead of giving answers that sound good.”

The college senior is weighing his different options for work, having realized through the internship that “the foot in the door is just as helpful as a two-year masters program.”

But Shelton doesn’t limit himself solely to academic pursuits. This summer he biked from Seattle to Los Angeles with a group of friends and thinks that if the job market is still slow next year he might just throw his bike on a plane and ride across Europe for a while. Traveling, his trip made him realize, provides experience on how to meet people.

“I’m not stressed out about what I’m going to do,” he said, adding that as a Quaker he embraces faith’s emphasis on being “still, waiting on the Lord, informs a lot of my perspective”