Vocational guidance for the professions

Front matter

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VOCATIONAL

GUIDANCE

CHAPTER I What Is a Profession?

T^fE SHALL have to admit at the outset that there ' ' is no hard-and-fast hne to be drawn between the professions and other sorts of vocations. Common usage reckons the bookkeeper to be "in business" — unless he happens to be a most uncommonly good bookkeeper; in which case, we call him an expert accountant and rate him as a professional man. Bookkeeping, then, is a profession at. the top and a business everywhere else. Yet who can say where the professional head leaves off and the business neck begins?

Teaching also is a profession at the top. The higher ranks of teachers are not especially different, in standing or in income, from accountants. But teaching is a profession clear through to the bottom. The grade teacher or the kindergartner is a professional woman, though her sister who keeps books, after an equal training and at twice the wage, is not.

Acting is a profession. The sorriest barnstormer, tramping the ties toward New York, considers himself a professional man and an artist. But the baseball player is master only of a trade, though he learns his trade in the first university of the land and has the salary of two or three college presidents. No degree of proficiency ever lifts the professional athlete into the ranks of professional yon-professional work. Finishing the coats of women's suits. These people are doing a particular task in a practical, riilc-of-lhiimb way and are clearly on the non-professional side of the line

All this, though a trifle illogical, is practically convenient. It would indeed be a rash man who should attempt to coin a definition of electrical engineer which would cut off all practical electricians, or say where the draftsman leaves off and the architect begins. And yet we all feel that however much \'arious of the modem trades may flower out into professions, any particular man or woman is pretty clearly on one side of the line or the other. As a rule, after one finishes the grammarschool course, he spends two, three, or four years in mastering the practical, rule-of -thumb way to do some particular task, and then keeps on doing it in the same way for the rest of his days. Or else one goes a great deal farther, gets much of his knowledge out of books, and continues a student all his life. In other words, he enters a profession.

WliaTlY a Profession f

The special characteristics of the professions are, therefore, these: They all require a somewhat long and arduous training before earning power begins. In certain cases this training is prolonged even to five or six years beyond college graduation. In all cases the professional education includes much that has little immediate bearing on practical duties. Promotion is characteristically slow, and high earning power usually comes only with the approach of middle age. Moreover, unlike the business man, the professional man does not make or buy or sell any material object, or make a profit on the labor of persons to whom he pays wages. His earnings are salary or fees, not profits. He is, then, essentially a wage earner. But he differs from other

Brown 6ro3.

Professional work. Teaching is a profession clear through from

top to bottom whether the work is carried on in a university

or whether it is limited to conducting a gymnastic

class in the lower grades i6 Vocational Guidance for the Professions

wage earners in selling his experience, judgment, advice, or ideas, instead of selling his strength of body, his skill of hand, or merely his time.

Clearly, then, "the professions" is simply a convenient term for a somewhat wide group of vocations which have a good deal in common with one another, yet share also the characteristics of many occupations which are not professions. Few artisans, for example, have the manual skill of most surgeons or of many laboratory workers. Banking and book publishing are almost as much professions as forms of business. Musical skill runs in unbroken series from the bass-drum player in the band who belongs to the musicians' union to Kreisler and Paderewski.

Nevertheless, common usage has settled it that certain vocations are professions, and the rest are not. Usage shall, then, be our guide.

CHAPTER II The Professional Type

THERE is no professional type. Every possible kind of man or woman, every possible combination of human qualities, finds its place somewhere in the professional ranks. There are all sorts of people inside the professions, as there are all sorts outside.

Indeed, each particular profession does more or less match some non-profession in the kind of person whom it attracts. Paderewski and our bass-drum player are both musicians; the pianist is simply a vastly better one. The same man who finds out what is the matter with our plumbing and cures it, would, if he had more ability of the same sort, be able to find out what is the matter with our digestion and cure that. The salesman who guides us wisely in the choice of a hat or persuades us into buying a necktie we do not want, is really the same sort of man as the lawyer who steers us through the mazes of the statutes, or convinces the jury that his rascally client is a wronged and innocent man.

In other words, the professional man is Uke other wage earners — only he has more brains, energy, perseverance, insight, independence, imagination. He is not a different sort of man, but a better man of the same sort. Sign painter and artist, stonecutter and sculptor, maid-of-allwork and teacher of domestic science — each professional member of a pair is the non-professional "writ large." If the other had more ability of the same kind, and the training to go with it, he, too, would be in a profession.

Business, also, in its higher ranks, takes in men who have

2 17 i8 Vocational Guidance for the Professions

nothing more than the common qualities or the special gifts of the inconspicuous and underpaid, but merely have these in greater measure. There, is, therefore, no real difference between the kind of man who succeeds in business and the kind of man who succeeds in a profession. There are probably few good business men who would not, if they had started in time, have done well also at some one of the professions. There is probably no profession some of whose members have not shown high capacity for business. And yet, as one looks about the world, one does notice a certain general difference between the business and the professional type. We think of the business man as alert, aggressive, able to handle men, especially interested in details; we think of the professional man as more cautious, more scholarly, able to handle books, and especially interested in general ideas. The difference is not at all a constant one. The distinction, in these days,

Sign painting. Art below the professional level """" ^""'

Tlte Frojessional Type

An artist's studio. Art on the professional level ™''° '"'■

probably fails more often than it holds good. Yet it is not a point to be ignored altogether by any youth who is in doubt on whieh side of the line between business and the professions he himself belongs.

Except, then, for this vague difference, which so far as it exists at all is more a matter of temperament than of intellect, there is no professional type of man or woman. One does not say: This boy or this girl is predestined to a profession; let us discover whieh. Rather one says: This boy or this girl is predest ine d Jo_thi,S-kind of work ; let us see whether it is to be done on the professional or the non-professional level.

In other words, entrance into the professional group is decided not by the kind of ability but by the amount. Any boy or girl who finds professional work attractive may be sure of having the right kind of talent for success somewhere. The only question is: Has he enough'

Abbott Lawrence Lowell — President of Harvard University

By training a lawyer and later a successful teacher of the law, he remains essentially an administrator. The portrait is that of an efficient business man who might equally well be president of a railway or a bank.

CHAPTER III The Rewards of the Professions

'T^HERE is no standard of payment for the professions.

J- Ask the wages of a carpenter or a cash girl, and you will be told pretty accurately — so much per hour, so much per week, such and such a rise with experience. Moreover, the general run of wages in a handicraft or business position does not vary much in different parts of the country. It is doubtful if any artisan or clerk in the land could double his wages by a mere change of residence.

But professional earnings may be anything. The average salary of public-school teachers in certain of our states is more than eight times that in others. Half the lawyers in the covmtry do not make even a bare living out of the law alone; but there is a small group whose earnings run to six figures. This physician charges his office patients two dollars a visit ; that one charges twenty-five, and sees twice as many in a day. The same artist, singing the same role, may be paid ten times as much in New York as in Paris. Professional incomes are like business profits — there is no standard. A man makes much or little, as he can.

The one obvious fact is that professional men, grade for grade, earn less than business men. If the highest yearly incomes of the professions touch six figures, those of the most successful business men are nearer seven. The presidents of our greater universities, though they count as teachers, are all really business managers. Virtually every one of them could become the head of a business plant at three times the income he is now getting.

Probably nine men out of ten who leave the professions for business better themselves by the change.

Nor is there much relation in the professions between eminence and income. A successful lawyer waits until his children are grown up and off his hands, and then accepts a promotion to the bench, at half or a third the returns of his office work. One physician may build up a large, fashionable practice and grow rich, but without being known outside his town. Another may devote himself to research, take only just enough paid practice to boil the family pot, do all his best work for nothing for the sake of running down some obsctire disease, and be famous the world over. Milton and Shakespeare hardly made a living out of their writings; but who recalls even the name of the author of last year's "best seller," which ran to a hundred thousand in the first month ?

No, the rewards of the professions are not money. Most successful men and women in the professional group would have had to do less work in a lifetime, and been better paid for it, if they had taken up some form of business; most unsuccessful persons could not have done worse no matter what they tried.

One takes up a profession not for what he can get out of it, but for what he can put in. For him who loves his work, that itself is its own best reward; and professional work offers more of interest and variety, and less of drudgery and monotony, than any other sort of employment, unless perhaps it be certain uncommon forms of business. If the professional man, as Agassiz said of himself, has "no time to make money," his chance of congenial work, of social position, of reputation, of liberty, of contact with the things of the mind and of service to the world, is usually very much better than

Copyrighted by Clinedinst, WaehingtoD. D. C.

Major-General, Surgeon-General William C. Gorgas, U.S.A. The fame of his achievements in Havana and Panama in the service of his country is world-wide. But his monetary reward was simply that accorded to one of his rank in the United States Army.

any non-professional vocation would bring him. It is for each person to decide in which form he will take his pay.

Any youth, therefore, who finds himself attracted toward any one of the professions must face this issue squarely: If he enters and succeeds, he will have to work harder and longer, and have less money to show for it, than if he had gone into business. If he enters and fails, he will have less than if he had learned a trade. But whether he succeeds or fails, if he loves his work he will have permanent satisfactions which no money can buy, and a joy in his labor such as he will find nowhere else. After all, as the proverb says, one cannot eat his cake and have it too.

THE PERSONAL PROBLEM

CHAPTER IV The Call to a Profession

SINCE the highest reward of professional life is not money but the fundamental interest of the work itself, one needs to be especially careful to pick just that work which he does most of all care to do. "Business is business" in more senses than one. We can decide to "go into business," and afterward pick out our special field. After we have started on one business, we may change to another. Men often do, many times. The man who does well at one business would probably have done about equally well at any one of a dozen others, and been equally well satisfied in the end.

It is not so with the professions. One must choose whether he will be a physician or an opera singer; and by the time he has gone through the long training needed to make him either, it is commonly too late to change his mind and become the other. Men take their professions "for better for worse," as they do not take most other vocations.

One must, then, be especially sure that he is right before he goes ahead. There are a few fortunate boys and girls who early make up their minds as to what they are to do, and stick to it. While still in the grammar school, a boy decides, let us say, on the law, a girl pitches upon nursing, and the entire education is built around that idea. Edison, for example, was an electrician from boyhood, and never really anything else. Louisa Alcott began writing as a child. Such choices are often as wise as they are convenient.

The (_ all lu a rrofession 2 J

But they are uncommon. Most of us have to feel our way along. On the whole, professional life looks attractive. A profession runs in the family, or certain people whom we especially admire happen to be professional men or women. But we have no specific call. Any one of two or three professions appears desirable, and we feel that we could succeed in one about as well as in another.

Probably we are right. As we shall see later more in detail, the various professions much overlap in the native qualities which they demand. The great violinist would probably have been about equally eminent if he had taken up the piano. Many clergjTnen would have done as well as schoolmasters or college professors. Many physicians would have made good men of science or engineers. Provided only a youth has enough ability to enter a profession at all, he can commonly choose which one of several it shall be.

One has only to read over the biographies of eminent men and women to see how commonly they have felt their way along from one possibility to another, until they finally came to their proper work. Holmes, Agassiz, and Huxley all planned to practice medicine, and then switched off and became anatomists. Darwin intended to enter the ministry. Priestley and Mendel actually did become clergymen, and carried on the scientific work which made them famous as the avocation of their leisure hours. The two Whitney brothers, Josiah D wight and William Dwight, each interested the other in his own future work until each, as a yotmg man, changed to the field of the other, and became one of the foremost men of his time in the profession which his brother had expected to enter. Few professional men have heard one distinct call to their work and from the beginning marched straight toward their goal.

Charles Robert Darwin

The great Darwin, who came of eminent professional stock, was first educated for the ministry; but iie found his proper professional work and acliieved his greatness in the field of natural science.

The 77aino~a^rofession 2Q

Most boys and girls, therefore, when they find themselves attracted toward any profession, will do well to look over the field pretty widely and to note all the possibilities within their range. Much will, of course, be clearly outside. Then gradually, as they come to learn more concerning their possible vocations, and as their own quaHty develops and becomes more and more evident, they can shut off one bUnd lead after another, and narrow down to the final choice. In fact, one of the main objects of this book is to assist just this survey of the whole field within the range of a possible choice, and to point out just why, for one youth or another, such and such an opening is "no thoroughfare."

The time for this general survey of the professional field is during the high-school cotirse. One is then at the time of life when the type of his intellect and the main elements of his character have already revealed themselves. He already knows that there are certain things which he cannot possibly do. At the same time, the details of mind and will are not yet fixed. One can decide what he wants to be, and to some extent make himself over to fit his pattern. Most boys and girls who have not already decided on a life work before they enter the high school, do so during their course.

In general, then, during the four years of high-school work most young people will have to make up their minds whether or no they care to enter any profession. Those who find that they do, ought by the time they graduate to have narrowed down their preferences to fewer than half a dozen different possibilities, and to have shaped their studies accordingly. Those who do not go on to college will commonly have made the final choice.

CHAPTER V Professional Life in Fancy and in Fact

SUPPOSE, now, that some particular profession looks attractive to a boy or girl, or that any one of a half dozen seems possible or promising. How shall one find out which he really wants, or if he really wants any.' There is only one answer: He must study, at first hand, the actual daily routine work of an average successful practitioner, and find out for himself exactly what he himself will have to do for the rest of his life.

There is a deal of false glamour about the professions. Many a girl who aspires to be a nurse pictures herself, slender and trig in her uniform, acting as ministering angel — the reader can complete the picture for himself. Nursing actually means being on one's feet all day, going short of sleep by night, and keeping one's temper all the time, while she washes, dresses, feeds, and makes comfortable a commonplace invalid made unreasonable by pain.

The lawyer does not commonly stand like Daniel Webster in the engraving, while judge, jury, reporters, and innocent accused hang on his words, or the guilty tremble under his eye. As a matter of fact, hardly one lawyer in ten goes into court when he can stay out ; while the routine office work of looking up statutes and decisions is about as exciting as finding words in a dictionary. Professional life is good to live, but for very different reasons than the outside public thinks.

Frank Parsons, who was the first to make a regular business of helping boys and girls to find their proper j^f^S'stzmalrirrfK- -in -r uncy and in Fact ji

place in the world's work, tells this story of an experience of his own with a youth who entertained the somewhat common delusions:

"A boy of nineteen said he wanted to be a doctor. He was sickly looking, small, thin, hollow-cheeked, with listless eye and expressionless face. He did not smile once during the inter^dew of more than an hour. He shook hands like a wet stick. His voice was husky and unpleasant, and his conversational powers, aside from answering direct questions, seemed practically limited to 'ss-uh.' . . .

"He had been through the grammar school and the evening high; was not good in any of his studies, nor especially interested in any. His memory was poor. He failed on all the tests for mental power. He had read practically nothing outside of school except the newspapers. He had no resources and few friends. He was not tidy in his appearance, nor in any way attractive. He knew nothing about a doctor's life; not even that he might have to get up at any time in the middle of the night, or that he had to remember books full of symptoms and remedies.

"The boy had no enthusiasms, interests, or ambitions — except the one consuming ambition to be something that people would respect. And he thought he could accompUsh that purpose by becoming a physician more easily than in any other way."

In other words, the reasons why the lad wished to enter the profession were precisely the reasons why he should have wanted to keep out.

Most certainly, no one shovdd ever take up any profession thinking that he "will not have to do any work." To be sure, it does look easy to sit in a comfortable office chair, chatting pleasantly with one caller after another.

J2 Vocational Gttidance for the frojessions

mth no fixed hours of labor except those which one sets himself. But there are long hours of brain-racking toil when the public is not b>', and the very fact that there are no fixed hours of labor deprives one also of all fixed leisure. For professional persons there are neither union hours nor business day. Most of them simplj' work all the time there is. Twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day have sometimes to be maintained for weeks at a time.

There is probably no human occupation where the contrast between appearance and reality is greater than in teaching. "Phew!" says the outsider, "two months' clear vacation in the summer ! Odd weeks along through the year! Five hours' work a day — and that mere holding a book to see if what the pupil says agrees with the printing."

As a matter of fact, more women break down at teaching than at any other occupation, except possibly nursing. The long vacations, contrary to general opinion, exist for the instructor, not for the pupil, who could well, for the most part, continue his not very strenuous mental exercise twelve months in the year. Teaching is such very hard work that the stronger private schools commonly expect their instructors to handle only three classes a day, while the great universities limit their men to one or two, and give them three months' vacation every summer and one entire year off in each seven. Even then the men break down. Such is the contrast between professional work as it appears to the outsider and as it really is.

What makes professional life so "ptmishing" is not so much the long hours as the responsibility. It is notorious that engineers of passenger locomotives, who also take heavy responsibility, sometimes go to pieces

J4 Vocational Guidance for the t^rojessions

nervously and have to go back to freight trains, though theirs is only the simple task of keeping on the track and on time.

When the plumber sets up a joint, and the joint leaks, he merely takes it down again (on our time) and does the job over tmtil he gets it right. But the physician who treats his patient for common sore throat when he should have discovered the beginnings of diphtheria cannot go back and try again. The patient is dead; the physician's repute has suffered beyond repair. When the engineer gives his opinion on a mine, that hole in the ground must "make good." If it does not, nobody is going to listen to any explanations. Many a good schoolmaster has lost his place through a single error of judgment in a case of discipline.

In the professions, moreover, there are no such "sporting chances" as in business. The business man expects losses. He is satisfied if he guesses right oftener than he guesses wrong. But the preacher cannot defend a thin sermon by saying that after all more people stayed in than went out; nor can the lawyer balance off the innocent client who was hanged against the rascal who escaped. As a famous teacher of engineering used to tell his students, "Your work is not done until you can stake your life on the accuracy of j^our figures."

It is this demand for certainty that makes professional life hard. "If you sue, you will be beaten," saj's the legal adviser. "I can't find anything the matter with you," says the consultant. "Your water supply is now free from typhoid," says the bacteriologist. And client, or patient, or municipality gladly pays the cost of a laborer's wages for a month. It looks like "finding money, ' ' but making the opinion worth paying for is what earns the fee.

X / cy tootc/i-Lti' j-iij^ Ltv r LifiL y and in Fact jj

The would-be professional man or woman must, therefore, get behind the scenes and see just what Ms future work is actually going to be. Let him keep his eyes open for hints. Let him make acquaintances in his chosen field, and see just what really goes into the day's work. Let him read, not imaginary tales, but the professional journals and the biographies of professional people. Best of all, let him arrange to be bom in a professional famih-, and see the life on the inside from his \'outh up.

CHAPTER VI Taking Account of Stock

SUPPOSE, then, one has decided that, on the whole, professional life looks more attractive than any other possible career, and has narrowed his preferences down to two or three of the most promising. Suppose also that this opinion is based on a real knowledge of what the profession really is, not merely on what it is imagined to be. The next step is to find out the actual facts concerning the boy or girl who hopes to fit into the professional niche.

First of all, unfortunately, must come the question of resources. Most of the professions demand a preliminary training which is not only long but expensive. It is said to cost ten thousand dollars to make a physician. He docs not, to be sure, have to pay it all himself, spot cash. But with fees and living, and the loss of earnings until he is past thirty, he really does not get out of his training for much less. In other words, the candidate for certain professions will have to stake at least five thousand dollars on his final success.

Various other professions offer shorter odds. The educational wind is distinctly tempered to the clergyman. A nurse in training, though she will be worked mercilessly, can nearly meet her cost of living. Some teachers get on with two years at a normal school. All these things have to be faced, and planned for in advance.

Then, after the preparation is over, comes oftentimes the long wait for something to do. This also varies greatly in different professions. Young men are rather

1 aiding Account oj block jy

in demand in teaching and in the ministr}^ since in botli thc3' have to deal much with young people. Many school s>'stems, however, hire no teachers who have not ahead}' taught one or two )'ears; while nobody wants to employ cither a physician or a lawj^er who has not first won experience by practicing on somebody else.

All this may make the start slow. One must count the cost of a year or two of possible idleness, or the certainty of slack work at the beginning of his career.

On top of all this comes the chance of failure in the end. The professions are, for the most part, desperately overcrowded. Competition is e\'cn fiercer than in business, and only the best men win.

There are in the United States, in proportion to the population, between four and five times as many physicians as in Germany — and the Germans are not complaining of any lack of medical oversight. We have at least three times as manj' lawyers as we need, so that only about one in four actually makes his living out of the law alone. New York City alone has more lawyers than all France.

The result is that the average professional man in this countr}^ ten years or more past the end of his normal training, is not making more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year. More than this, at least one person in e\"ery twi) who attempts to crowd into a j^rofession — in certain cases as many as nine out of ever>- ten — fails completely and has to turn to something else.

Practically, then, entrance upon a profession resolves itself into this : The candidate risks from one to ten th( aisand dollars and from two to ten years of his life. At best, he has an even chance of success; at the worst, the odds against him are ten to one. If he wins, the average value of his prize is twenty-five hundred dollars a year.