If you’re like me, a fresh graduate of college you may be experiencing some interesting emotions that were completely un-expected. You probably feel like you hit a brick wall with no doors and no signs of what to do next. It’s like being at the starting gate of the rest of your life but the gate just isn’t opening. What’s more your social network is moving away or somehow not what it use to be. Many are asking themselves why they are still working a part time college job when they have this degree diploma hanging on their wall. Let me discuss the nature of this transition point.
The first thing is understanding how this situation was set up to automatically happen, like I’ve always said “the first step to change is understanding”. Believe it or not we were trained to think something that is false. For the last fifteen to twenty-five years, depending on how long you went to school. You have been preached to and drilled into your mental understanding that a college or post college degree would provide the key to your happiness. The day you graduated the perfect dream job would be awaiting you as you walked off the stage with your degree in hand. Unfortunately this has never been further from the truth especially with the current economy worldwide. To give you a little idea of what I’m talking about there are over 1.2 million graduates from college a year in the United States alone. I guarantee you there are not 1.2 million new dream jobs available each year. Then you throw on top of that all the super brains that come in from other countries and you can see right away that the competition is suddenly painfully high. With this depressed economy it is even harder to find jobs that are considered dream jobs. The very fact that you still have a job at the local Starbucks is a blessing even though it may not be your dream job.
The second part of these emotions is the loss of a readily available social life. Along with the preaching and drilling of guaranteed success you have had a very well organized social life with opportunities to create relationships. In school whether it was grade school or college you had things like sports, classrooms, dorms and organizations where a body of people were brought together in a situation where you were pressured to interact and in the process were drawn to certain people that had shared interests. This makes it easy to form relationship that eventually grow into meaning and become very important to you. You also had the support and interaction with teachers, coaches, mentors and the constant checking up from mom and dad.
So how does this all lead you to where you’re at right now? This support system has been building over the years of your life up until graduation day. Then suddenly as you walk off the stage with your degree, it all explodes like a bomb. Nobody is offering you a job, all the job openings that you qualify for are entry level only and you are one of four hundred applicants. Your friends begin to return home or move away to take whatever job they can find, teachers and coaches are not seeing you every day anymore, and those random midnight group runs down to the local taco shop stop happening. If that’s not enough you have to find multiple part time jobs to help pay off the educational debt you accumulated over the years. All the sudden you went from the top of a mountain with a full working system around you, to looking up at a huge hurdle with a system that seems to be falling apart. Welcome to the transition time of your life.
It’s not that you have failed or missed something. It’s just that you are now starting over again, only this time at a higher level. You have to rebuild the structure of your new life. It’s like waking up on the first day of attending a new school, no friends, no niches, NO IDEA. haha Now that I have walked you out on the plank of reality let me bring you back in with another part of reality. THIS IS ALL NORMAL! Haha I guarantee if you ask any one of your relatives, teachers, or coaches they will all tell you that they have been there. You just never hear them talk about it because lets be real, who talks about the down years?
Starting over is always hard and slow. Continue to work at your situation you will begin to make those grown up friends, get closer to a smaller body of friends. As you continue in your search for a job you’ll find that the creation of a new life will lead you to meet new people that hold opportunities for you. You never know the next person you serve at the local restaurant may be in need of a new marketing rep with good people skills, trust me I’ve seen it happen plenty of times at the restaurant I worked at with other recent grads. In fact the job that I currently have, I got because I met somebody at my cousin’s little league baseball game. The truth is you haven’t failed you haven’t missed something your just beginning a fresh new start. The broken system is mentally telling you that life is over. It’s not it is simply transitioning into a new one, starting from scratch with a new set of skills. Build those new relationships, join in with that new club at church, take your dog for a walk, and work hard at your part time job. Go ahead transition into the rest of your life. It’s coming and it’s going to be great!
Feel free to leave any comments or questions I’d love to cover topics of interest to you, the reader :)
No comments:
Post a Comment