I graduated… now what?
A few months ago I graduated college and moved 22 hours away from home, and now I’m in the “now what?” phase of my life. A phase that I don’t think a lot of people know exists.
A little background. I grew up outside of Rochester, NY in a small town. A town where everybody knew everybody, it was like a little bubble. After high school, I went to college in Southwest Ohio, Miami University. I loved my four years there, but I didn’t want to stay in Ohio and I always knew I wasn’t going to move back home after school. So, a little over a year ago my best friend and I decided that we were going to move to Florida. I love warm weather, I love the beach and Florida felt like the change I was looking for. I spent the better part of my senior year looking for jobs, trying to make this move come to fruition. Finally, in late April, I landed a job at the biggest Public Relations firm in the world. One might say all my dreams came true, but now what?
The period after you graduate college, your early twenties, is weird. It’s weird because all of a sudden you’re in charge of yourself, it’s weird because when you go visit home it’s a trip and not “going home”, it’s weird because now you have to “adult”, and it’s weird because all of a sudden you don’t live down the street from all your friends.
I have decided to treat this period as a time of experimentation. I graduated with two degrees, neither of which I am 100% sure I want to use as a career. When you get your first job out of college it’s so different than what you might have thought it was going to be in school. That first post-grad job is often glamorized in a way that leads you to believe you’re just going to fall in love with it. I don’t think that’s true, and I think it’s okay to play around with a few different jobs right after school to find the right fit. People don’t realize that you might not like the actual job that goes along with what you majored in, so maybe you experiment with that a bit. If you move away from your hometown, who knows if you’re gonna like where you choose to live. Maybe you move somewhere, hate it and move again in a few months.
The moral of the story: use your early twenties to experiment, move somewhere new & exciting, travel, try out a few different jobs, meet new people, and stop worrying about the rest of your life. Maybe, just maybe, “I graduated… now what?” Doesn’t need to be filled in quite yet ;).
