What do I do after graduation? I explore the world in parallel to my current plumbing job.
By Zaden Smith UA’25 and Jim Stellar
ZS took classes with JS in his senior year. That began a conversation outside of class about what ZS would do when he graduated in the Spring of 2025. He has an unusual undergraduate history as someone who has also worked for 7 years as a plumber. In fact, our last conversation before he graduated was about when do you know as a plumber after you have removed a pipe clog when the clog could be anywhere in the system and might even recur. It seems to us that this indirectness, despite a clear physical system, is a bit like looking at how the brain makes decisions where neuroscientists are looking at tissue indirectly through brain scanners but at a distance and with no manual. Since this blog series looks at how college students make such decisions about their pending careers, one could ask how it applies to ZS’ situation as a recent college graduate?
I (ZS) have been interested in many subjects, such as history, classical literature (some fiction as well), biology, neuroscience, philosophy, spirituality, sociology, language and culture, and to some extent technology. My goal is to integrate information over a wide domain.
All of the different fields about which I read contribute to one another in obvious and in imperceptive ways. Each reveals aspects of human nature that are relevant despite being different. Currently, I read what I can about these subjects, from books to research papers and other articles, and work to integrate them into my own writing in essays and papers into something more digestible and informative to others who are not so knowledgeable on these topics. It is important to write as well as read. An example might be this blog.
The internet is a useful tool as I have access there to video lectures and articles from other professors and experts who help explain ideas of interest to me in succinct and depthful ways. I look at a lot of material about psychology (my major), but I also believe each subject (e.g. history) has its own understanding of the human condition and each serves as pieces that eventually can come together and create a more whole image of who we are. For example, we each vary on how this information grabs us.
One field that especially interests me is, of course, neuroscience and how the brain and its pieces work together to underlie who we are. This, also, of course, an interest of JS as a professor of behavioral neuroscience and the subject of the classes I took from him in my senior year. Then and now, we often talk about how my work background as a plumber solving structural/functional problems (e.g. a clog) is similar to how the brain structure underlies behavior. That is, perhaps, my ultimate interest in becoming a clinical psychologist – to deal with things that have gone wrong in a person’s psychology and their brain, like PTSD.
(JS) How let’s go back to how this thinking applies to your history of being a plumber?
Working as a plumber, I constantly get asked “What clogged my pipes?” and I always explain to them that doing this work is performing a blind job. I use tools such as snake cables and high pressure water jets to clear the sewer lines, but I never see where they are going or what they are hitting up on. Although all pipes eventually converge into a single pipe, called the main sewer line, it is always a puzzle figuring out how the pipes get to where they need to go. I can only feel, and from that feeling I can surmise what the obstruction is based on past experiences, yet most of the time it is simply safer to say “I don’t know,”.
Unless me or my coworkers discover tangible evidence of a clog (lots of grease, roots, wipes, feminine products, etc.), we can only guess at what caused the issue. We also have no idea how long these clogs have been a problem for, sometimes it was within the day, other times we estimate it was a slow buildup over months, it’s never an easy question to resolve. Given the complexity of subtle factors which all interact and influence the efficacy of a sewer system, there’s really no telling what the official nail in the coffin is, until we are able to return with a camera service.
To go back to my interests in the brain and behavior, of course, we cannot meet all psychological problems with inserting a camera into someone’s head, however I find that those who work in mental health and adjacent medicinal fields are also working on blind jobs. There’s an overwhelming amount of details and aspects to a single individual when conducting assessments and tests I find are quite similar to my work as a plumber and maybe never actually knowing what clogs the pipe. Most of the time the doctors never know what directly started a psychotic break, or an addictive streak, or a depressive episode, they can only observe that they contribute to the maladaptive behaviors in varying degrees of severity.
JS (again) How does this apply to life in general?
To look at the rest of life strictly from the lens of one domain leaves you blind to the significance of the rest, since all of these aspects of life interact and influence each other in a variety of ways. Especially within the social sciences, it is rare to discover the one sole cause of a disorder or misbehavior, rather it is, mainly the context, that provides us with the insight. To go back to my interests in clinical psychology, some claim that the reason we get angry when we are hit over the head with a stick is that we experience a rush in hormones (i.e. fight or flight), but upon receiving this blow, we are perhaps more preoccupied with the action – fact that we have just been hit. The hormones support our anger perhaps but the key is how we react in this situation. Did the stick fall from a tree or did someone throw it. If the latter, are they spoiling for a fight? Am I?
I guess that we are products of history, and certain events indeed influence our development and that guides our reactions as above. But our inner workings, even down to biology, the microbiomes in our gut, what substances we just used (e.g. caffeine), etc. These societal, psychological, and biological circumstances (really the context) are also important. All of this is important to my goals of likely entering the clinical psychology or health psychology field. But it remains a bit of a blind process.
Note: We will be back as we try to unpack what might actually be the process of making a career decision, including applying to graduate school.
