This exquisitely informative article in the NY Times will help to lessen the shocking dose of reality that might otherwise paralyze the newly graduated twenty-somethings who’ve recently been unleashed on the job market. It sucks to have finally figured out the bureaucratic red tape that is student loans and financial aid, and now you’ve got a whole new mess of paperwork and money-related crap to wade through and comprehend.

The article explains quickly and simply what a newly-minted adult needs to know about retirement, health plans and taxes. These are good things to know about (and to avoid screwing up) sooner rather than later.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I love school; everyone who knows me can tell you how pissed I am that being a professional student isn’t a marketable skill. I stretched out my college career for as long as possible, and only stopped when I looked around and saw what my perfectionist tendencies and my exemplary GPA were doing to my family (it turns out it’s not possible, for me, anyway, to be a straight-A student and a good mother and wife).

As much as I adore school and wish it to be the answer to all professional and career-related bumps, quandaries and questions, I must say that I agree with Penelope Trunk’s post: Seven Reasons Why Graduate School Is Outdated. I do think that getting a graduate degree is necessary for some individuals and for the pursuit of some professions. But I also understand that the professional world is changing, the cost of higher education is rising, and it’s not a small thing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree you may not necessarily need or ever really use.

People don’t stay in the same career for fifty years like our grandparents did. There’s a lot of motion in the workplace and along the career path. Everything looks to be in a pretty constant state of flux, and the people who seem to be adapting the best are the ones who are capable of learning as they go and switching lanes mid-stride.

Getting a huge dose of education at the beginning of the journey and then staying the course throughout the length of one’s career trajectory is fine if you actually stay in that particular field of interest and skill. But what if the subject matter that most interests you when you’re 22 isn’t what you want to continue working in when you’re 35?

I don’t think graduate school is outdated in all areas; I’d say it’s fairly necessary in several fields. I do agree with Trunk’s point that one should not use graduate school as a way to discover what one wants to be when one grows up, and one should perhaps rethink the idea of getting an incredibly expensive degree in an area one sort of thinks maybe they might want to earn a living at some day.

I’m not telling people to decrease their educational goals and aspirations, and I’m not trying to put undue amounts of pressure on anyone currently trying to decide what they want to be when they grow up. I’m just pointing out that Ms. Penelope Trunk made some excellent points regarding the possibly outdated graduate degree. I was in such disbelief that I actually agreed with what she was saying (being super pro-education) that I felt it was necessary to bring attention to her line of reasoning.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

For any recent college graduates who might be heading off to their first year of teaching, this post on Ephblog lays out with severe honesty what a first-year teacher might expect. I’m not a teacher, but I’ve learned from scores of them, and I found it interesting to read about what it’s like for a new teacher to jump into the breach for the first time. The post is the first in a summer-long series about teaching through the eyes of Williams College graduates and should be worth checking out.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Education doesn’t stop, even after you’ve finished that last final exam and have turned in that last paper. Fruit flies have an average life span of only 37 days, their brains are minuscule, and they still have to endure learning experiences every damn day. So, comparatively speaking, humans have thousands more learning opportunities in our lifetimes.

Not news you want to hear right after graduation, I realize. Please don’t kill the messenger. I recall hollering with glee, ”I’m never reading anything but fiction again!” after what I thought would be my last final for a while. And then I went back to school because I just couldn’t get enough.

To help you with the learning part of life, and to hopefully avoid the painful mistakes, I have an awesomely simplified resource for post-college adult responsibility that will help you to understand the grown-up world of money, even if you’re in your twenties and are pretty sure you don’t need to know about something you don’t have yet.

Most college graduates are pretty new to the concept of money coming in, even if it’s at a trickle. Ramit Sethi’s site, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has a huge number of articles, resources and advice on how to deal with the having (or not, as the case may be) of money. Sethi explains the hell out of retirement planning; a two-year-old could understand it (and find it necessary). He’s also got great information on simple stuff college students can use, like how to use a separate debit card for an enveloping system, or more complicated topics like personal entrepreneurship or investing.

Go learn something and try not to screw up your finances at a young age.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

This may have been particular only to my high school career, but from what I’ve seen, I think most kids leave high school with the feeling that they are destined to be amazing and have only to be unleashed on the world and this innate stupendousness will become apparent.

I grew up in a small, one-high-school town where the weekly paper was all of twelve pages and four of those were devoted to the kids in the community. Suffice it to say, it was almost impossible to be a nobody and most of us graduated feeling like awesomely special big fish in a small, safe pond where all adults thought we were wonderful.

You can imagine the shock we felt upon entering college and discovering an ocean of bigger and much more special fish. Leaving our small town and going to college was somewhat hard on our fragile egos, but graduating from college and moving into the real world was crushing, to say the least.

We had erroneously believed that high school was going to be the hardest four years of our lives; the real world, we were dismayed to discover, is harder. My ten-year high school reunion was a roomful of twenty-somethings who were bummed about admitting to everyone that they had not, as it turned out, blossomed into the superheroes we had all assumed was our due. I realize (now, as a far wiser thirty-something) that it would have been impossible for reality to live up to our skewed, hormone-fueled ideal future.

The party picked up once we all took a good look around and realized that not a single one of us was anything more than just plain old normal. Just getting through the week in the real world without caving in is heroic enough. I was a little sad for myself and for the now-adults I’d spent thirteen years of my childhood with—we’d all expected so much more from ourselves and from the world. We were all happy and healthy and were making our ways through the world just fine. But none of us were famous and the learning of crap was still occurring. Reality is one long, drawn-out learning process. It’s so disappointing! When does the learning stop?!

And there you have it: life is hard and is one sucky life-lesson after another. On the upside, almost everyone else on the planet is living some version of The Learning Life that you are. There’s an article in BusinessWeek about recent college grad Max Leiber who takes a temp job and learns about the harsh realities of outsourcing: How I Helped Move a Factory to Mexico. Every job, temporary, super, or otherwise, is a new learning opportunity and it’s interesting to read about Leiber’s experience.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Catch-22 is safely ensconced in my top ten books list; it’s been there since I read it over a decade ago and I can’t imagine that it will ever be demoted. It’s such a perfect, perfect description of being caught in some bureaucratic, red-tape moment wherein the powers that be are unmoved by your pointing out of the obvious, utterly effed-up impossibility of your situation. You’re screwed because you’ve managed to find a special little corner of Rule Hell in which the guidelines contradict themselves and now there can be no forward or backward motion that might enable your extrication from the situation.

The job-hunting process can definitely be heavy on the Catch-22 nuances. This is especially true for the newly graduated. Your brain is packed full of (mostly) worthwhile information, but you lack any real job experience. Employers would prefer not to hire someone who has ridiculous amounts of knowledge but few real-world job skills. This realization usually makes the young job applicant scream (on the inside) something along the lines of How can I get any job experience if I can’t get an effing job, you freaks!

And there it is: you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. Right out of college, you pretty much have a diploma and some summer job experience to bullet-point on your résumé.

And that is why god created the internship: the unpaid, coffee-fetching rite of passage that won’t make you much money but will teach you how to do the job you want so badly that you’re willingly to work for free to learn how to do it. Internships are also invaluable networking venues; connecting with pertinent individuals in your field will be beneficial to future job searches and career moments.

Searching for internship opportunities is pretty similar to the job search process: search for “internships” on any job search site and a list of possibilities will magically appear. Alternatively, you can apply for an actual job, and note on your résumé that you’d like to be considered for the little- to no-pay internship version of the available position. What fool employer would turn down someone who’s willing to work for free? (This may not work in the law, medical or air traffic control fields).

If you’re still in college and are financially fortunate (or are really good at being poor) you can use the summer to do an internship. It’ll give you an extra bullet point on the résumé and will give you a better idea of what a job in your chosen field entails and whether you actually want to continue pursuing this career. Colleges and universities always have some informed person (librarian, career advisor, department secretary, etc.) who can hook students up with internship links, info, ideas and lists.

Further reading:

Internships a ‘win-win’ to help get job

Resources:

The Benefits of Volunteer Work
Top Eight Tips for Finding an Internship
How to Become a Volunteer to Gain Work Experience
Idealist.org
Undergraduate Students: Gaining Work Experience

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Allie Osmar has a great post up on her blog listing the good and bad bits associated with her first year out of college and in the corporate world. She uses the same pain assessment graphic hospitals use when trying to get a straight answer out of little kids regarding the level of pain they’re experiencing (smiley face = no pain, crying face = lots of pain). Osmar does an excellent job of laying out an honest list of the painful and wonderful parts of that first post-college year.

It’s funny(ish) because it has to be—no one straight out of college is quite yet numb to the state of nature that is Being An Adult (nasty, brutish and not nearly as short or as sweet as your college days were). The real world has the potential to really, really suck. But it is what it is and we can make of it what we will. I think everyone has the capacity to do well and be happy (all at the same time is a nifty trick). Realizing that everyone else is having ten wretchedly real-life moments to every amazing one will really help you get through the day. We’re all in the same boat and it’ll all be okay, I promise. Do what you can do and for god’s sake don’t take everything so seriously.

Posted by Alexa Harrington