ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603250001
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
Meet Matt Mahoney. He graduated from Virginia Tech just last May with two degrees - one in English and one in biology. He wants to be a doctor.
In many ways, it's been a long year. He went home to work for the summer. He came back. He went home again.
But now, the bumps in the road toward finding a job - no, make that a post-college career and life path - seem to be smoothing out.
In two months, thousands of Tech and Radford University seniors will find themselves in the shoes Mahoney wore this time a year ago. They'll graduate into an employment picture much brighter than that of only a year ago. But even with employers filling Tech's 24 interview rooms all day every day in search of workers, graduates will deal with a transition from the life they've always known.
"It's just going to be different," said Donna Cassell, Tech's associate director of career services. "You're going to have to re-establish yourself socially and financially."
While it's important to build toward a career, "nobody's putting you in a position of making a decision for the rest of your life," said Cassell. Think in terms of "building blocks."
All in all, Mahoney, an Arlington native, sees things working out pretty well now.
"I've got some new friends; I'm moving into D.C.; I'm doing cancer research," he said this past week.
That's a different picture from the late December day when he packed up his Blacksburg apartment, wondered if he'd ever get into medical school, and decided to start again.
In December, three med schools had sent rejection letters. He planned to go home and find a job. The idea was to take his savings and strike out on an idealistic, rigorous journey to help him finish gathering himself after this tectonic shift of a year. He dreamed about hiking the Appalachian Trail, end-to-end, between March and August.
Mahoney was luckier than many when he exited academia's halls in May. He had a good temporary job, snared through a friendly connection.
All summer, he tested bone marrow and blood cells to see how closely donors matched leukemia patients at the National Institute of Health's National Heart Lung and Blood Institute near Washington. He took a "pipet," which is like a syringe, dipped it into a solution containing both patient and donor cells, and dropped the solution into wells on plastic plate. The plates went into an incubator; the results came back a week later.
"In certain ways it was exceedingly interesting, but in other ways, after I'd done it a few hundred times, it was incredibly boring," he said.
The pay - $9.50 an hour - was good, and he could live at home. Then, Sept. 30, the temporary job ended. Mahoney decided to come back to Blacksburg for the winter - at least until word from medical schools started to return. "Relax after a hard summer of work," he laughed.
"I wasn't happy," he said. "I think the biggest thing was the shock of going from school to a 40-hour work week. With commute."
So he got a job waiting tables in a local restaurant.
"I wasn't looking for a career," he said. "I wasn't even pretending I was looking for a career. I was looking for a job."
And that, he says, is what most of his friends still in Blacksburg seemed to have found. Jobs. Not careers.
"It's not really a career town," Mahoney said.
When he left in December, Mahoney was frustrated.
But now, he's found his spirits have lifted. His luck has turned.
At the end of February, he started work at the Children's National Medical Center, a job found through a contact, doing more research. But this time, "I have more autonomy and I'm part of a larger project that has more meaning for me."
Every day, he rises at 6:30 a.m. and heads for the lab, where he's working on a research project to fight certain types of tumor cells, like Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
"The idea is to have a type of cell which would selectively kill cancer cells and leave important tissues alone," he says. "My job is to 'pipet' these cells into tiny plates, incubate them and feed them, stimulate them with the peptides we think might work in treating cancer."
If this works, preclinical trials may be next. It's a big project, and Mahoney feels like his role is important.
He also has an interview with a medical school this month.
The world looks different now. Looking back, "I was sort of wandering aimlessly between greater goals," Mahoney said.
"I think I made the right decision accepting my current position, especially now that I have been invited to interview at med school. I still have the ambition to hike the trail, but this job was what I needed to reach my ultimate goal of being a doctor, and I had enough time playing around at Tech, anyway."
On a philosophical level, it's been an instructive year.
"I think that many people dive into the 'real world,' get hooked on the money and material aspects, and never escape again. They get trapped doing jobs they enjoy marginally or not at all, they run themselves into debt, they stop trying to learn.
"My goal is to always be learning, and as I become wiser, to teach others. My goal is to never stagnate, but to thrive on life, and to enjoy it while I can."
Not a bad lesson learned, this first year out in "the real world."
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: GENE DALTON/Staff. Matt Mahoney, as he packed up toby CNBleave Blacksburg in December to resume a job hunt in Northern
Virginia. color.