Life after college manifests different for everyone. Your background and current circumstances are determinant factors, partially. I want to know
Personally, I received many congrats but not much guidance.
I’ve graduated, with an internship that pays, (barely) but this is supposed to catapult me into SUCCESS, right? My Communications/American Sign Language degree and concentration has set me up for the rest of my life, right?
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Here are some things I wish someone/anyone would’ve told me about Life After College:
- Don’t rush into a Graduate Program without clear vision.
Which is, exactly what I did. Two months after walking across the stage with a BA, I was enrolled in a MBA program. I felt as if I had to keep going. “A Bachelors degree is not enough…” I told myself.
At first, I was headfirst into my graduate program. Then, I realized, “You have monthly rent now, not a dorm, you have student loans, you need a full time job like yesterday“. God works things out for us even when we have no clue what we are doing. My enrollment in the MBA program landed me my first salary position as an Office Manager for an Oil and Gas company. It was an ideal, first-job-out-of-college position. I learned and grew a lot. The money afforded me to move into a safer neighborhood.
However, the demands of running an office made my GPA suffer. I had to take a break from graduate school, to pay bills. My vision wasn’t clear. Don’t rush into a Graduate Program without clear vision.
2. If you go into a career-field as a back up choice, meaning the field was not what you went to college for, You WILL be unhappy.
My Bachelors of Arts was in Communications with an emphasis in Public Relations and a language focus in American Sign Language. What did that mean for my career path? In my naivety, I expected an unpaid internship to manifest into my dream job, which it did not. Plan B: office management. While the communication and organizational skills I acquired in college made the job easy, the hours and needs of everyone in the office drained me in many ways. So, as plan C, I decided to become a teacher. Why not? I’d worked as a substitute, after-school program tutor and babysitter in undergrad – Teaching couldn’t be that hard.
Teaching was the most socially rewarding, mentally draining, financially costly, emotionally stressful – career I tried. I did not research or even anticipate the non-instructional duties and responsibilities demanded of teachers, especially at the elementary level. If you go into a career-field as a back up choice, meaning the field was not what you went to college for, You WILL be unhappy.
The video below is what ACTUALLY happened to me after college. Perhaps, my case is a bit extreme, but God put me through this because he knew I would find my voice one day and share to help others.
We all go through things, find someone willing to share with you that you can share with and learn from.
Discuss!