There is an unspoken understanding that students leaving Yale will find employment that requires them to work with their minds. Manual labor is not something that we came to this university to train for. But all my experiences-in the field, in the construction site, and even in the classroom-suggest that physical work can teach a depth of mental strength that we do not acquire in our academic studies.

I've spent my summers at farms and summer camps; I've cleaned toilets, washed dishes, herded goats, stayed up all night with vomiting eleven-year-olds, picked green beans, braided garlic, and unloaded milk trucks. I've never held an unpaid internship or spent a summer at a desk. And a month after graduation, I boarded a plane to Sitka, Alaska, to join a group of Yale students doing construction work at Sheldon Jackson Campus, the new home of Alaska Arts Southeast.

The Sheldon Jackson College on Baranof Island, in the Alaska panhandle, first experienced financial setbacks in the 1980s. In 2007 it closed its doors, leaving the town of Sitka with a beautiful, empty, and quickly deteriorating college campus. In 2011, the campus's twenty buildings and over twenty acres were given to Alaska Arts Southeast, with the hope that the shuttered classrooms and dormitories would grow into a thriving center for arts and humanities. Hundreds of volunteers donated thousands of work hours and half a million dollars to restore the school, which is now a National Historic Landmark. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins '12, who grew up in Sitka, invited Yalies to join in the effort for the summer through a program called Bulldogs on Baranof Island.

This summer, as I watched many of my friends begin their working lives-as teachers, analysts, activists, journalists, law students-I couldn't help but compare my own form of work to theirs. What was manual labor teaching me? What was I accomplishing? And what did it mean for an Ivy League graduate to choose to install insulation all day?

Two years ago, after a series of jobs on farms, I was certain that I wanted to be a farmer. I loved the work and thought it held important value for society. I knew that I preferred working actively with my body, hands, and mind (even as a summer camp dishwasher) to writing emails, making spreadsheets, and spending the entire day behind a computer screen. But as I begin the process of building a career and working life, I've begun to worry that to choose to farm would be to shirk the responsibilities of my degree in some crucial way.

Though I have long held physical work to be an important part of education, I have come to distrust the rhetoric of "fulfillment," "satisfaction," and "good work" that dominates many conversations about the value of elite students engaging in manual labor. In an attempt to clarify my own thoughts, I decided to ask these questions to other Yalies who had chosen to join the Sheldon Jackson work crew or had spent time doing manual work elsewhere. Their answers were thoughtful, varied, surprising, and illuminating, and resonated deeply with my own attempts to define education and ethical work over the past four years.

Alaska is a place that people run away to. In Into the Wild, John Krakauer writes, "Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives." Though my six-week sojourn to the city of Sitka in the mild, misty southeast isn't comparable to Chris McCandless's fatal journey into the Alaska bush, I share some of the idealism and escapism that made McCandless such a controversial figure. I like doing manual work because I lose myself in it. These humble tasks have their own unsullied enormity. Call it therapeutic, call it lazy, but I enjoy pulling up weeds for hours or sanding beams all day. There is an element of escapism in conducting hard physical labor-but it also cultivates its own life of the mind. We discovered that the mind and body aren't so separate after all. 

In May 2009 when I read Michael B. Crawford's New York Times Magazine article "The Case for Working With Your Hands," it electrified me. Crawford traces his journey from political philosophy Ph.D. to motorcycle repairman and, along the way, makes the argument that concrete work has an intellectual and ethical dimension sorely lacking in our information-age economy. Concrete work, he writes, "answers to a basic human need of the one who does it." Meanwhile, country's relentless focus on "mind work" and higher education (at an increasingly astronomical cost to students, I might add) is not serving its citizens' minds or morals. Working with one's hands cultivates "individual responsibility" in a way that abstract work never can. He wrote of "an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience." According to Crawford, not only was my individual integrity at stake, but the fate of my community as well: "Work forms us, and deforms us," he warned, "with broad public consequences."...

To continue reading Laura Blake's article in The New Journal, please follow this link: Mind in Hand.