Читать книгу 20 Something Manifesto - Christine Hassler - Страница 23

They say that college is the best four to eight and a half years of your life. Whoever “they” are, they hit the nail right on the head. College was everything I could have imagined it to be and more. While a lot of aspects of campus life mirror what is portrayed in the movies, one major aspect of “movie college life” is completely inaccurate: When Bill McPopular gets close to graduation, job offers start coming in. And of course Mr. McPopular’s job offers are for incredible amounts of money with amazing benefits, most of the time including cars, mansions, and beautiful women.

I was not naive enough to actually believe that happened in real life, but I thought that finding a job out of college would be easy. I never thought making it on my own would be this hard. I graduated with a respectable 3.3 GPA with extracurricular activities and leadership roles under my belt — I did all the right “get a good job after college” preparatory things. Heck, my sister lovingly refers to me as her “overachieving brother.” I was sure that I was a shoo-in for a decent job out of college.

My opinion about my opportunities out of college was inflated by positive reinforcement from professors and advisers. Putting all those compliments together with parents who made life pretty easy, it seemed like I was completely awesome.

I haven’t had horribly bad luck since graduation. I have a roof over my head, a head on my shoulders, and some money in my wallet. On the other hand, I haven’t had incredibly good luck either. I just have not reached my expectation of having a respectable job that’s rewarding both financially and personally. That makes the exciting dating life I expected out of college unaffordable and thus unattainable as well. I am building up the all-important experience factor that will hopefully land me the great job soon, but I am still the lowly, dateless, broke intern.

I may have been an all-star during college, but now that I am in the big leagues, I am just another rookie who has to pay his dues with a résumé that looks like everybody else’s. Now I see that the encouragement I received from mentors was supposed to be used as a spark to get my fire going after college, instead of using it as the wind in my sail. Instead of having it motivate me to get where I wanted to go, I used it as the fuel that would take me there without much effort. It took a month or two of getting kicked in the butt to figure it out, but now I am back on track.

While it is frustrating to not get instant gratification for all the hard work that I have put into the grand investment that is my life, I think that it will be much more meaningful once I do reach success.

“I am consumed by the societal and self-inflicted pressures to accomplish ‘life milestones,’ especially on a given timeline. It’s all I can think about.”

Student, 21, on a break, Arizona