Meaning-making is an important process to the personal and professional development of students in higher education. Today’s educators need to acknowledge and encourage the meaning-making process in order for these quarter-life students to enjoy an enriched life of meaning, as well as excel in academia. I challenge educators to apply meaning-making to their own lives in order to gain a deeper understanding of their personal purpose in their lives and as educators on college campuses. Written within a Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, my thesis proposes that, through the deep and personal meaning-making process, students and educators can create a more meaningful experience in the classroom on today’s higher education campuses.

Making sense of anguish is an important process leading to personal growth, development, and overall meaning making. Today's quarterlife students (students between the ages of 20-25) may face a variety of traumatic life events that influence how they grow as individuals and are able to move forward from these experiences. I examine several topics that many quarterlife students experience during these challenging years. As a gay identified individual, I examine aspects of `coming out' and the reluctance of blooming into the individual that I wanted to be. I examine the impact of resenting those individuals who may have hurt you and the ultimate growth that results from the pursuit of forgiveness. I then examine the importance of not sacrificing who you are within romantic relationships, and how being in abusive relationships can inhibit one's ability to be happy. Lastly, I close with how despite all of the traumatic experiences one must overcome, we all have the ability to be happy and construct positive meaning from such times of anguish. Written within a scholarly personal narrative methodology, my thesis examines several generational life events that have the potential to cause anguish, and how one can harness personal growth and meaning making from traumatic past experiences.

This thesis, a social novel in the tradition of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is all at once an attentive first-person study of a twenty-something man close to his cracking point in his first post-college job, a detailed expose of national fraternities, and the sweeping panoramic view of an entire generation of over-programmed college students searching for direction. Frat Star follows a fragile college graduate named Charles Washington, who takes a position as an "Educational Consultant" with a national fraternity in his first semester after graduation. For sixteen straight weeks, he drives across the country, from college to college and fraternity house to fraternity house, meeting with alumni and students, and living on frat house couches and in seedy off-exit hotels. As he travels, the pressure mounts for Charles to convince his family and friends back home that this is a "Real Job" and that his work actually matters to the business world, but at each new fraternity house he visits, his yearning for the old college atmosphere grows--the beer, the parties, the girls!--threatening to send him into a frightening tailspin. How can he be a professional when the temptations of youth still seem so attractive? And before Charles can sort out what is happening in his own life, he finds himself stuck in a vicious tug-of-war between students, alumni, administrators, and the national fraternity, when he must deal with one particularly abrasive undergraduate fraternity and the aftermath of its disastrous decisions. Spanning thousands of miles, from Florida to California, from Illinois to New Mexico, this thesis takes us inside fraternity houses, into their attics and their basements, behind the scenes of their rituals and ceremonies, inside their parties, inside their heads, giving us a view not only of the power of the national fraternity, but the disconnect between alumnus and student, between Baby Boomer and Generation X and Millennial. Incorporating research as varied as the generational studies of Howe and Strauss, and Alexandra Robbins' psychological study of the "Quarterlife Crisis," Frat Star stretches across the country, stretches across genre, stretches from text to illustration, but is ultimately the human story of a young man's longing for morality, independence, and purpose in a world he simply has not been prepared to understand.