Facing the Reality of Graduation
Warning: Graduation is coming! Be honest, are you ready? I know I’m not, but with graduation and the end of my master’s program in sight, I can’t avoid the inevitable.
For the most part I’ve loved my time here at Syracuse–aside from the crazy weather and a few other things. However, I’ve gone through this year knowing that sooner rather than later it will all come to an end and I’ll be faced with the real world–which is a truly scary thought. My biggest fear at the moment is not having a job after graduation. Obviously I didn’t have to worry about this last time I graduated because I knew I was coming here after. I had a plan. This time around I don’t have anything of the sort. I have dreams and wishes right now, but unfortunately those aren’t going to pay the bills.
So what do I do? For the moment, I’m trying to focus on my classes and job so that I will officially graduate and I’m hoping pieces will start to fall into place on their own. This is more optimistic than I generally like to be, but I don’t have too many options at the moment.
If you’re anything like me and you don’t have everything figured out, fear not. I’m sure many people have felt like us in the past and more will feel like this in the future. The best thing we can do is work on our resumes and focus on getting those degrees. If we do that, we’ll be in a pretty good position to start looking for jobs and hopefully, maybe, with a small bit of magic, we will get jobs that don’t totally suck.
Ideally I’d love to work somewhere that would allow me to do the things I love the most: travel, write and take photos. (I’m looking at you Nat Geo and Thrillist). At this point though, since I haven’t had too much experience in the communications industry outside of a university setting, I’ll settle for something that at least lets me occasionally write and take photos, even if it means having to stay in one city for a really long time. As much as I love to travel, I understand that I’m most likely not going to get my dream job straight out of school and that I’ll need to work for what I really want, and that’s okay. If I don’t get a job until six months to a year after graduation that’s not ideal, but it’s still okay. Trying to stick to a pre-planned timeline when I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future just isn’t practical so I’m trying my best to go with the flow and see where the future takes me.
If you came to this post looking for advice about how to cope with impending graduation, sorry about that. Mostly this has just been me rambling about the things that have been running through my head for the past few weeks/months. If this helped you at all in any way, that’s awesome! Hopefully you’re not so worried about what’s coming because in the end, you can’t really control what’s going to happen, you can just control how you let it affect you. Basically, what I want people to take away from this post is life is going to happen whether we want it to or not, so we’d better try to enjoy it while it lasts.
