|
|
 |
Left: Documentary makers Hillary Mohaupt and Evan Mohl |
Hillary Mohaupt
Rockford, Illinois
Undeclared
“What is vocation?”
When my friend Evan Mohl ’07 and I set out to make a documentary in the spring of my first year, we didn’t think that would be an easy question to answer, but we thought we could handle it with few difficulties. It turned out to be a little more complicated than we’d expected.
With around 30 other first-year students, I participated in Macalester’s Lives of Commitment (LOC) program, exploring the relationship between work, ethics, vocation and community involvement. We met as a large group once a month and as smaller groups each week to venture out into the Twin Cities to volunteer at sites related to immigrants and refugees. Evan and I went to the Jane Addams School of Democracy in Saint Paul.
I participated in Macalester’s Lives of Commitment program, exploring the relationship between work, ethics, vocation and community involvement.
—Hillary Mohaupt |
The Jane Addams School is unlike any other community I have ever been a part of. There, college students mingle with Spanish-speaking, Hmong and East African immigrants on an equal playing field. Within learning pairs of one immigrant and one college student, we intentionally carried out the school’s philosophy that everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner. We bumbled through learning each other’s language, thought up creative ways to share our cultures with one another and pondered how best to study for the citizenship test. We were not there to volunteer as much as to participate in the community.
In the winter, Evan and I learned of a film contest exploring the notion of vocation. The Lilly Foundation, a sponsor of Macalester’s LOC program, held the contest for college students around the country. We knew the foundation thought of vocation as a divine calling and inherently Christian, while we believed a person’s sense of vocation could come from a wide range of influences and varied from individual to individual. We focused our documentary on the Jane Addams School, where multiple influences—not limited to religious beliefs—affect perspectives on vocation.
We spent our second semester and nearly the entire summer immersed in creating a documentary about Macalester and Jane Addams students and their notions of vocation. Everyone we talked to seemed to have developed an individual definition, and I realized that my own concept of vocation, informed by my religious background and cultural experience, was evolving. Did we find a common thread in all of these voices? Vocation is nurtured within a community with people who bring different stories to the table, people who learn from each other in a democratic space. Is that the right answer? Maybe. Maybe the right question is—“What’s your vocation?”
|
