Readers React: Yes, college graduates, it’s OK to follow your dreams

to the editor: The message in the piece by Barry Glassner and Morton Schapiro — the presidents, respectively, of Lewis & Clark College and Northwestern University — could easily be, “Follow your dreams and see where they lead,” because it appears both men did just that. How else to explain Schapiro’s trajectory from being an aimless undergraduate student in a poetry class to a professor at a university? (“Congratulations on graduating. Now give up on your dreams,” Opinion, May 5)

Whether you call them passions, dreams or whatever else, they spark our imagination and fuel our paths forward. To casually throw off the idea that “opportunities presented themselves” as if the gentlemen and their interests were not part of the equation is absurd.

Graduates should remain open and adaptable to all opportunities. But if anyone suggests they ignore the inner passion guiding them in career and life, well, I would ignore them.

Susan Treadwell, Los Angeles

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To the editor: If my son had not followed his childhood dream of becoming a firefighter, he would not have helped rescue a despondent woman preparing to jump from an overpass into traffic on a busy street in Emeryville, Calif., on Tuesday.

When he became a firefighter, he said that he was “living the dream.” Kudos to all the men and women who live the dream, especially those who look out for the rest of us.

Sarah Cooper, Redondo Beach

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