Its Graduation Season

When I graduated from college many moons 5 years ago there are lots of things no one told me.

No one told me that it would be next to impossible to find a job, let alone a good one.


No one told me that the second you accept a job offer, a better one will come your way.

I read a piece of advice the other day that really rings true in a "If I knew then what I know now" sort of way. Here it is:

After graduation, you will have a terrible job. You’ll probably have more than one, but rest assured, you will have at least one terrible job.

Don’t worry though: it will seem like the greatest job in the world when you get it. You know how you’ve spent the past four years honing your critical thinking skills, developing complex theoretical understandings of the world, and collaborating with like-minded intellectuals?

Forget all of it.

You are going to spend the first month (at least) doing the most mind-numbing work you can imagine. You will lick some envelopes. You will make a lot of runs to get documents from places around town. You will also find out that your health insurance doesn’t kick in until after a 3 month waiting period, that pay checks are delivered two weeks after the pay period ends (and you started in the middle of a pay period, so not for a month… sorry!), and someone at your office will irrationally hate you because you are young and enthusiastic...

You will either cry or feel like crying at your desk.You’ll probably move up in the ranks—you’re smart, you’re a go-getter, you have ambition. But it will take a long time and it turns out that your new responsibilities are similarly mind-numbing, but now there are more of them.

You will spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you “really want to do” and will probably utter the words, “I would rather write my senior thesis all over again than do another mail-merge.”


To all the recent college graduates out there, read this, take it to heart and know that you're not alone. Embrace the suck, work hard and hope to God that someday you'll figure out what you want to do with your life!