Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2014 | Page 43

PuBlISHED alumni Learning to Become How does this alumnus measure the return on investment of his education? by Brandon J. O’Brien M.A. ’07 economics, between religious histories and my experience among rural mill workers. In other words, my education was helping me see how things were connected. It was helping me make sense of my experience. In his essay “The Art of Fiction,” novelist Henry James admonishes novice t least once a week for the six months writers, “Try to be one of the people on I worked with him at the lumber mill, whom nothing is lost.” It seems to me Vernon slapped me on the back and said, that education is a success if it produces “This is the sort of job that makes you wish this sort of people, whatever they should you’d gone to college, huh?” Then he’d end up doing for a living. The young man laugh and laugh. who studies philosophy and later decides I had been to college, which was to stay home with the kids so his wife why Vernon thought this was funny. can pursue her career; the young woman Grading lumber was not my first job after who majors in piano performance and graduation but, at $7.50 an hour, it was the later runs a small business; the students best paying so far. In any case, Vernon had who never do anything related to their degree are nevertheless worlds richer if hands the width and girth of a catcher’s their education makes them one of the mitt and forearms like small hams. That’s people on whom nothing is lost. This why I laughed at his joke, too, every time is especially true if the education is he told it. Christian and therefore helps students see After graduation—and for several years all things through the lens of Scripture. after that—I had no clear idea what I Colleges are under a great deal of wanted to do with my education. It was certainly clear to me what I didn’t want pressure these days to justify what they to do. Grading lumber, for example, was have to offer. It’s important to parents and not on my short list of career possibilities. students who will have to bear education But I always knew what kind of person debt that they can explain what they I wanted to be. College studies left me will do with their education. I wonder unsatisfied with simple answers to complex how many are asking what sort of people they will become in the course of their questions and convinced that the more I knew about nearly anything, the better I’d education. The return on investment of my be at whatever job I ultimately settled in. education, at this point in my career, is Graduate studies at Wheaton helped me begin to see the connections between issues not that I make more money as a college graduate or Ph.D. than I would otherwise. I’d never considered related—between The return is that I’m becoming the theology and national foreign policy, person I always wanted to be. between biblical exegesis and domestic a Brandon J. O’Brien M.A. ’07 and his wife, Amy Packer O’Brien M.A. ’09, live in Conway, Arkansas, with their son. Brandon recently completed his Ph.D. in historical theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is the author of two books, most recently Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes (InterVarsity Press 2012), which he coauthored with E. Randolph Richards. Brandon “does” a good many things: writes and edits, teaches Bible and theol ogy part-time, and trains pastors and educators. W H E A T O N     57