Life lesson #43298: What you think you should do is sometimes completely different than what you want to do – If only I could jump back to last summer to tell myself!

For what seems like forever, I have told everyone from friends, random people at parties, teachers, and family members that upon graduating undergrad, I would head off to graduate school to a M.A. or Ph.D. program in English literature. In fact, during my first year of college while my classmates were mostly concerned with figuring out their major requirements, I obsessed over taking the right classes designed for graduate school track students, finding the right internships, and doing everything the right way towards getting to graduate school – ruling everything out that did not fit in the perfect English grad school box I put myself in.

As you can imagine, it’s a rather rude awakening when everything doesn’t fall into place like you planned for it to.  Looking back, the moment I realized that my plans were not something I really 100% wanted to do anymore was during a conference meeting with my thesis advisor. She asked me why I wanted to attend graduate school. I was silent. I had no answer. I sputtered off some generic – the “I’d like to advance my studies in literature” excuse. But it felt so fake, so fabricated, and hearing myself say it bothered me. I didn’t like the way it rolled off the tip of my tongue. I didn’t like the way it made me feel about where I wanted to go in my future.

There is a huge problem when you don’t really have an answer as to why you are doing something major like applying to graduate programs, and this started the downward spiral of my graduate school plans. Another red flag was my honors thesis project. Like many seniors, I was completing a sixty-page thesis project (I was working in the area of girls’ fiction in children’s literature). I picked the topic myself, but not even a month or two into the project, I hated it. I wanted nothing to do with what I was writing and saying and researching. There I was working on something very similar to what I would be doing in graduate school, completely unhappy. Not good, right? Read More »

In elementary school, I made friends in the sandbox – sharing my buckets and shovels. In middle school, I made friends by being that new girl from California living in a small Georgia town. In high school, I made friends by joining the newspaper and writing about my misfortunes of high school dating in an all-too honest column. In college, I made friends and bonded with them over two hour road-trips, Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits, and gas station food. Looking back, the whole process of making friends has always seemed easy, but now what?

I’m out of college, on the opposite side of the country, living with my dad who thinks he is starring in his own comedy sitcom, and completely alone. Those closest to me are elsewhere. My boyfriend is on the opposite coast. My best friend is in the middle of Atlanta. My dearest, bestie ever is living in South Africa! My college friends are strewn across the USA. And here I am, writing about how to make friends at 22 years of age without an inkling of what to do.

In all honesty, I’m actually surprised with the sudden need to make friends. Going into my senior year of college, the girls I thought were my friends for life broke up with me. The friend break-up was a major wake-up call! Although it ended up being one of the best things that happened to me, and I was really lucky to get out of that situation, I will admit – it made me very cautious and guarded about people and their intentions. During senior year, the word “friendship” was completely out of my vocabulary. Read More »

I don't know what to do!

Looking back, college didn’t require a lot of serious decision making – even though I thought it did. For the most part, I made decisions about frivolous things such as: Should I wear pajamas to class today? Should I stick to rum and Coke or go for the Jager bombs? Should I go out tonight or should I spend time working on that eleven-page term paper? I know at times these choices sure stressed me out, but looking back, they really didn’t matter the way post-grad decisions seem to.

A lot of difficult decisions have come my way recently. There was me deciding where to live. Atlanta, Georgia or Southern California? It was not an easy choice to make, and many factors played into my choice to move to California. Then there was the decision of what to spend my time doing. Should I reapply to graduate schools for next year or pursue my other dream of becoming a lawyer? These questions required a lot of long-term thinking, and I’m glad that I had the time and the options to choose from. However, now that life is moving full speed ahead – more life-decisions are coming my way and many of them are giving me a day to decide, instead of a month or two.

So, you know how I was running my mouth last week about no jobs being available and how awful it is trying to find something? Well, that very same day, I received a call back from a marketing firm wanting to hire me for an entry level position. A real adult job. One with benefits and a respectable first year salary. One that requires business professional attire from 8:30am to 5:30pm. A marketing firm with connections to major Fortune 500 companies.

Sounds great, right? Well, they could only take me on as a full-time worker Monday-Friday, with a lot of events that I would be required to attend on the weekends. My initial reaction was whether or not I could balance my LSAT prep course and study time in the midst of having a blossoming career path. Could I do both? Maybe, but I’m not someone that does things half-assed, so a balancing act possibly could jeopardize my work experience and hurt my practice for the LSAT. Read More »

The casting call reads, “Holler if you’re blue collar!”

In a move that could only come from the minds behind Jersey Shore, TMZ is reporting that a new series featuring the best in beer bellies, jorts, and John Deere hats will be coming to a television near you.  You’ve heard me right; Party Down South (they need to work on that title) is looking for twelve lucky rednecks to wave the rebel flag and disgrace the South in all ways possible.

Jersey Shore brought us new, orange-tinted reality stars that left us asking why they were suddenly famous (not to mention the advent of poofs, fist pumps, hair gel, spray tans, and senseless nicknames).  Am I alone in wondering what this new crop of southern imports will bring to prime time television?  Excuse me while I allow my mind to drift to all the horrors about to beset “normal” society…

1.  Just how many racist jokes can one audience handle before these new stars’ trailer homes get torched? I know it’s going to happen, you know it’s going to happen.  Someone will bring a white hood and suddenly the guy who punched Snooki looks like a saint.  It’s a sad, pathetic fact, but if it’s rednecks these casting people want, it’s rednecks they’ll get. Read More »

[We're following one post-grad as she grabs that diploma, packs up her college life and heads on out to the big, bad world. There's a lot of change comin' her way and with a cross-country drive, she's got a lot of time to think about it....]

If you told me three months ago that I would drive across the United States to California, I would have never believed you – especially if you told me I would do it alone. Yes, I am making the journey from Georgia to Southern California alone, just me and my packed up Toyota Camry.  As I write this, I’m on day 2 of my four day trek – currently camped out in a hotel room in the middle of Texas.

“You can’t drive alone!”, “It’s not safe to drive across the country by yourself!”, and “Why would you want to drive two thousand miles alone?” were the usual responses upon telling anyone my plans.  My parents were even freaked out about me doing it. Even my dad offered to fly out to Atlanta and drive with me – and he does just about everything to avoid getting on an airplane. But to me it’s not such a big deal. This is really no different than living in New York City for the summer by myself as an intern or traveling around Europe last summer.

I’m 22, why can’t I do it by myself? Is it because I’m a woman that people are freaked out about this? Or is it because of the distance, which seems like nothing when it’s split up into nine or ten hours in a car per day? I don’t know what it is, but I’m glad to be proving everyone wrong. I’m doing it – and so far, I’m doing just fine (this is where I knock on wood). Read More »

Another week has passed and I’m one week closer to graduation. In ten short days I will stand up, toss my cap in the air, and graduate in front of family, friends, professors…and a bunch of random people I don’t know.

Many of you have already taken this step. You’ve cried sentimental tears or jumped for joy as you packed up boxes and drove away from your home for the past few years. But if you have the pleasure of a quarter or trimester system you, like me, are lucky enough to have a smidgen of time left.

A lot of people have been worrying about the typical things that soon to be grads and recent grads worry about: getting a job, finding an apartment, moving, paying bills, insurance, liver recovery, taxes. I am stressed and concerned about all of these things. But I’m also stressed about some basic issues I haven’t considered until recently, like friendships.

For many grads, we’ll be moving away from the network of friends we’ve created over the past four years. For me, I will be moving clear across the country and my insecurities are rising. All my friendships are about to change and come June 14, I will be in a Long Distance (Best Friend Forever) Relationship. Read More »

Somehow, the girl who always comes stumbling into your 9 a.m. with uncombed hair and smelling of vodka from the night before turns out to be the only one in the class with an A. Other times, the guy who always cuts class or, if he actually manages to show up, winds up falling asleep is the only one in the class who actually managed to get an internship this summer. Basically, in a nutshell, looks may be quite deceiving.

And that is exactly my opinion about this new study by York University that says college grads are unprepared for the workplace. The study names a bunch of qualities and characteristics our generation is supposedly lacking, which might leave us all screwed when it comes to our futures. However, I think researchers are just looking at everything the wrong way.

Study Says: We fail to communicate and listen respectfully
Uh, do researchers have any idea of our obsession with Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin? Is this not considered communication? With my friends constantly updating their Facebook statuses letting me in on every detail of their lives, I think it’s safe to say we know how to communicate. If anything, we know how to do so more effectively (there’s nothing clearer than “liking” something) and efficiently (who needs a phone call when you can GChat from the office?).  Read More »

I did it! I graduated. Although the moment of hearing my name, walking across the stage, receiving my diploma, and turning my tassel went by incredibly fast, the road to Commencement has been an unforgettable eye-opening four-year journey.

It’s been made up of classes I’ve loved (like Arab-American literature) and those I’ve hated (Computers 100, I’m talking to you and your Microsoft Word projects). There were those endless papers analyzing literary theorists, ethical dilemmas, Shakespeare’s couplets, and acts of radical feminism. I worked on and cried over hundreds of math problems and graphs, all while reading books that would forever change me and the ways I think about the world around me. I wrote and edited poem after poem for numerous workshop classes, while expanding my poetry vocabulary from e.e. cummings and Emily Dickinson’s collections to the voices of Lorine Niedecker and Naomi Shihab Nye. All these academic experiences led me to learn things I would have never known if I strayed off on a different path.

Outside of school, I interned – a lot. There were the internships I learned a lot at, and the ones that failed to utilize their internship programs to the full extent. There were the people in the business world I met that I admire and respected, and then there were the ones that made me promise myself “I will never end up like that.” I traveled, whether it was from the Upper East Side to SoHo in New York City or from London to Paris for a weekend. Honestly, I even spent most of my time in college traveling to and from other colleges around me (this was part of my college’s campus culture – especially at such a small all women’s college), which convinced me that a two hour car ride is nothing but a quick ride down the road. Read More »

As a little girl, I always knew I would go to college. It was the way I would make myself in the world. Throughout college, I had endless internship opportunities. In fact, I had to turn down many of them because I couldn’t work them all at once. I had the chance to live in New York City for a summer and for a month of January. I studied abroad in London. I was asked by the English department at my school to complete an Honors Thesis – something only a few students are asked to do every year. I thought I did everything right, and figured my post-graduation experience would be equally as exciting as my college prospects.

Surprise! I haven’t even graduated yet, and nothing has gone the way I thought it would or how I want it to, and with graduation next weekend – it’s time to come up with a game plan for the ominous future.

Originally, I thought I wanted to attend graduate school and work towards a higher degree in English literature. I spent the entire fall semester working on taking the GRE exam, filling out graduate applications (and spending major money on sending them out!), and writing the most intense essay of my undergraduate career to send along to my program choices. In the midst of all this, I spoke with my academic advisor who told me “Charlsie, don’t worry about it – I think you’ll get in wherever you want, you’ll have the option to choose where you want to go. You’ll do great.” Despite the stress and pressure I felt from all this, her reassurance told me to expect the best and relax about my future. Read More »

For college seniors, the fear is setting in right about….. now. Finals are coming to an end, graduation is looming (or already happened), and with nothing else to do, you’ve got a lot of time on your hands to think. And wonder. And freak the f**k out.

I remember when I was finishing my senior year. I developed a paralyzing fear that would wake me up in the middle of the night (even after wine pong night when NOTHING should wake you up). For the first time in my life I had no idea what was coming next, where I’d be, what I’d be doing, or who I’d be doing it with. And if that isn’t enough to make you crap your pants, well, you’ve got nerves of steel.

Of course, now different things scare me. Like Guidos, my parents finding my “list,” and people with tracheotomy holes (OMG I just Googled that for spell-checking purposes and nearly barfed), but thinking back to that point in my life still, to this day, gives me pangs of anxiety. Some CollegeCandy writers are at that point, so in an effort to get everyone thinking of something besides the bleak economy and leaving the best 4 years of their life behind, I asked everyone to share their biggest fears this week. And – BONUS! – I got some dedicated CollegeCandy readers to share too!

Ricki – University of Michigan: My biggest fear is spiders.  I always have to check the ceilings before I go to bed, just in case.

Rachael – University of Miami: My biggest fears are losing people I love, truly being alone, failure (aka living in my home town forever). Oh, and snakes – I can’t stand snakes. *Shudder*

Andi – Drake University: Getting a paper cut on my eyeball, and having someone throw-up on me. [A CC reader! Submitted via Twitter]

Brittany – University of Saint Thomas: Rejection and hydroplaning. Read More »