Gradvice: Your Post-Grad BFFs

After four years (or more, if you’re lucky) navigating your familiar college campus, it’s time to face a new, not-so-familiar world. It’s time to find a new favorite pizza place, a new mani/pedi shop, and a new bar with cheap specials on Wednesday nights. Oh yeah, and for many of you, you have to find some new friends with whom to frequent those locations.

By CC Staff

Finding your place in this next phase of your life isn’t always easy. In fact, as I’ve said before, it’s really freaking tiring.  But there are some tools out there to help you hold onto the familiar and survive the scary unknown. Here are your soon-to-be post grad BFFs:

1.   Skype: Oprah’s obsessed with it and for good reason. All you need is a computer (clearly, you’ve got one since you’re reading this), a webcam (there are cheap ones available on Amazon or at Wal-mart) and some internet (which you can jack from any of your new neighbors who aren’t smart enough to lock that sh*t down). You download the program for free and then talk to any of your friends in the world for free, face to face. So, if you’ve got one friend teaching English in Korea and one friend doin’ the political thang in DC and you’re sitting at your parents’ trying to find a job, you can still “get together” weekly for some old time recaps.

2.    Twitter: I’ll be honest; it’s incredibly difficult to keep in touch with people after college. Everyone is busy doin’ their own thang: making friends, impressing their new bosses, passing out at 7pm after happy hour… Even if you do get some time every other week to talk, phone calls or emails aren’t enough to stay totally connected. Enter Twitter. I know, I know – who the hell would ever want to know what you are doing all the time? Uh, how about your friends? They knew every detail of your life in college, so why wouldn’t they be interested now? Get over your resistance to Twitter addicts and hop on the bandwagon. Set up an account and have your friends do the same. You can all follow one another and really stay connected on the day to day happenings. That’s the stuff that really keeps people together, after all.

3.    GChat: Unless you work for an awesome company like this one, most offices block AIM at work. And let me tell you – when it’s your first year out of college and you are doing some really. boring. sh*t at work, IMing your friends is the only thing to get you by. Good thing most offices keep Gmail available. You can keep that open all day and use Gchat to IM your friends (and they even allow you to login to your AIM!). It’s genius, really. (And if your office does block Gchat – those bastards – try meebo.com, where you can login to AIM, MSN messenger, Gchat, etc.)

4.   2 Buck Chuck: Adjusting to the whole 9-5 lifestyle is stressful. When was the last time you were in the same place for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? More likely, your classes were scattered, your start times varied, and you could always skip lecture in favor of a hangover. Best way to ease the stress? A drink. Especially a cheap one. Don’t waste your money on $6 beers at the bar – you should be saving that stuff! Instead, load up on Charles Shaw wine (available at Trader Joe’s). It’s cheap ($2-3), tasty, and the perfect way to relax on your couch after a really long day at a computer. And, yes, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a glass of wine alone. (Right?)

5.    DVR: Life after college doesn’t look like SATC or The Hills for most people. What it really looks like is this: wake up, go to work, come home from work, go to the gym, come home and eat a bowl of cereal on the couch in front of the TV. Go to sleep. Do it again. Being that most of your out-of-office time will be spent in front of the TV, the DVR will be your best friend. You can catch all that “quality” programming that plays while you’re at the office (after all, you haven’t missed an ep of the Price is Right in 4 years!), and then have plenty to watch when you get home and your brain hurts too much to do anything else.