When I was in college, I went to a lot of conferences, career advisement meetings, and coffees with internship bosses. Namely, I’ve received a lot of advice about my career and, although not all of it has been wildly useful, some of it’s really stuck wih me.
Here are some of the best pieces of career advice I’ve heard (or figured out for myself).
I graduated about four months ago and this is the first September I can remember where I’m not in school. It’s pretty wild.
And post-grad life is… nothing like I’d imagined it would be based on television and magazines. And it’s not just me. Whether you’re a fellow recent graduate or you’ll be graduating soon, here are the truths about graduating from college and the myths about post-grad life that aren’t true. While everyone’s experiences won’t be the same, these should help you breathe a sigh of relief when your plans aren’t going…as planned.
I’m not going back to school. It’s officially starting to sink in. I’ve been in school since I was three years old and my life revolved around it — clubs, due dates, essays, exams, back to school shopping, that first day of school outfit, schedules and teachers.
This is the first year of my life that I’m not begging to go back to school shopping. It’s the first year that I’m not tirelessly deciding what to wear on that first day back.
I’ve always been someone who tried really hard in school. I always studied and handed assignments in on time. When I did poorly on exams or papers, I got genuinely upset and fell into a funk. It feels almost sad that all of those years have amounted to a single diploma…one that, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not entirely sure where I put it.
I’m quite Type A in the sense that I like to know what’s going to happen next. I like having at least a vague sense of plans. With school, there was the structure I needed. You knew what came next. Maybe you didn’t know what school you’d end up in, but you knew what to expect. Or, at least where you were going next. It was a checklist:
I think most people hope to find lasting friendships in college and I’m really happy that I truly feel I have. But, with that being said, I’ve had dozens of friendships in college that more or less ended at graduation. Not in a bad way or in a particularly sad way…it’s just how life is sometimes. Some friendships last for a long time and others don’t.
But, even in college, there are some tell-tale signs a friendship has the potential to last a long time. There’s no magic formula for friendship. And, sometimes you’d be surprised at who you end up staying close with. But, here are some questions to ask yourself when trying to figure out if a friendship might last for a long time.
