A funny thing happened to me the day I graduated. It was a normal graduation day. I put on the gown and the big square hat. I stood in line with my classmates as we laughed and reminisced about our good times. The dean of the university and guest speaker, Aaron Greenspan (one of Canada’s best criminal lawyers) gave an inspiring, yet comical speech. My parents waved to me with pride. I shook a few hands and took my degree.
As soon as the ceremony was over, I looked over the paper.
There was absolutely no mention of what to do next. No instruction manual to find happiness, no step-by-step guide for financial security, and definitely no syllabus for future success.
It was the plainest document that ever took four years to be written. As excited as I was about my accomplishment, I was deeply saddened that the journey had to end because I enjoyed being a student so much that I never wanted to stop. I wanted to stay in self-discovery mode. And I didn’t want to give up the carefree lifestyle of Wednesday night drinking and annual OSAP windfalls.
Basically, my celebration of accomplishment turned into an immense fear of the next step I had to take in life. If you’re a soon-to-be graduate, I’m going to give you a heads up on some of the harsh truths ahead:
Your lifestyle does a complete 180
School lets you live in a bubble where you’re expected to party, play, and celebrate your youth. Graduation means financial responsibility, student loan payments, nine to five workdays, mortgage rates, and the end of my extended adolescence.
In school, you receive constant feedback and opportunities to improve. If you’re sick, they have doctors. If you’re sad, they have counselors. The entire institution is dedicated to your improvement and well-being.
Even the social aspect can be kind. Most of your classmates are the same age, attend the same place each day and are like-minded. You probably have a group of friends or roommates who have the same routine as you, so you’ve got something to look forward to every Saturday night.
Most of all, being a university or college student is an identity. When someone asks, “What do you do?” at a party, you reply, “I’m a student. I study economics.” Being a student was simply who I was.
Then I graduated…
I could only claim to be a recent-graduate for so long before I felt unemployed and lost. Post-graduate life has no solid structure. No more report cards to tell you how well you’re doing. No clear routine of scheduled seminars and lessons. I hadn’t been successful in lining up a job, so after a few weeks of waking up and not having anywhere to go, I felt isolated.
Anyone who has spent an extended time unemployed or underemployed knows it can suck, but it has a seductive side no one talks about: comfort and complacency.
After I graduated, I was able to coast on credit cards, a part-time job that gave me about 14 hours per week and support from family and the girlfriend I lived with. Though I was “actively” looking for a job, I definitely got a little too cozy in my misery.
At first, it was a low-stress lifestyle.
I slept until I woke up, took my dog for walks in the park, worked out, started a blog and played more video games than I care to admit. I didn’t have to deal with the workday grind. Little by little I slipped into a nostalgic rut, struggling to take the next step.
Friends and former roommates started getting jobs and ended up in different cities. We used to be students on the same campus, but now they became accountants, managers, city planners, or corrections officers. They had to dedicate their time to their relationships, careers and the future, so it only added to my isolation.
I didn’t expect to get used to this misery after I’d graduated, but I did. I’d procrastinate on job hunting, anxious to get out of my rut, but was nervous when applying to a few jobs here and there.
Now, when I turned desperate and pushed myself to apply for jobs in my field more actively, I ran into my next problem…
Society’s job recruiting tools are tedious and ineffective nightmares
Day one of post-grad life had me sitting in front of my computer, not exactly sure how to get started. Now graduated, how was I going to do this? I opened up the usual job sites: LinkedIn, Indeed, Workopolis, and Monster intending to apply-click to as many jobs in my field as I could. Professional head hunter Nick Corcodilos has been critical of these job boards for their ability to actually match people with jobs.
As he writes on his website, “None of them offer any evidence that they can work.” Corcodilos references an infographic put out by Indeed about how they attract 140 million unique visitors each year.
“The infographic slams us with impressive statistics about web traffic, number of job postings and resumes, percentages of job seekers that visit — all kinds of data. […] After scanning the clever infographic, you probably believe it. Well, I don’t. I think it’s all B.S. All I see is that lots of people find job listings on Indeed.”
It didn’t take long until I started to see what he meant.
When I graduated, my potential job fields were digital media, communications, marketing, and journalism. What I didn’t consider was trying to fine-tune my resume for each job I applied for. Each company has different job titles, roles, and positions. Some are vague (Communications Co-ordinator), some are specific (Assistant Copy Editor of Sports) and some are several jobs rolled into one (Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer in a Marketing Department for the Communications Company). Now, you can probably use the same resume whether you’re applying to Burger King or McDonald’s, but a full-time career becomes complicated. Each posting requires a unique approach based on the industry, company background, and website.
Then came the cover letters. The dry, time-consuming, formality that no HR manager wants to read, but that still needs to be there for some reason. After all of the resume re-writes and wrestling out passable cover letters, I’d fill out an online application form. Which is essentially typing all of the same information from your resume into an online jot form.
After going through all of this tedium, there isn’t a guarantee that you will get a response. Job boards filter candidates based on keywords in resumes and give applicants ratings based on the position’s criteria. Therefore, employers only see a handful of resumes out of the hundreds they may be receiving.
Some of you who know better may be screaming “Network, you fool!” by now, and you would be right.
It took nearly a year of wallowing in underemployment and unemployment for me to find better ways to grease the wheels. Experts agree that referrals are the best ways to get an interview.
Then came MORE surprises once I actually landed an interview.
Job interviews can feel like The Hunger Games
One of the first interviews in my field was with a small media company for an entry-level video editor position. So, I wasn’t expecting a long drawn out process. Here’s how it went:
- Phone interview with an administrative assistant for pre-screening
- Fill out an official application form and some kind of aptitude/personality test chock-full of algebra questions
- Have the official phone interview with an administrative assistant who asks mostly the same questions as last time
- Spend a few hours completing a mock assignment to confirm my qualifications
- Meet the owner of the company for coffee and have an in-person interview
- Meet the owner and video manager for a dinner interview. Find out it’s down to me and one other candidate
- Receive an email (after 3 months of interviews, follow-ups, and uncertainty) informing me that they’ve picked the other candidate.
I was devastated.
The stress and frustration of getting my hopes up and wondering when my career would finally begin were crushed. I was back at square one. Worst of all, it wasn’t the first time I went through a long interview process, only to come up short. And it turns out that interview processes are, on average, getting longer.
My previous interviews at fast food restaurants and understaffed retail stores wrapped up in minutes with the manager asking, “Can you start tomorrow?”
Several months of waiting around for “the call” left me afraid to apply and go through it again. I knew my industry was competitive and it was entirely possible that I could keep finishing in 2nd place indefinitely.
(If you’re looking for career ideas, check out The Best Eight Careers For Canadian Graduates in 2020.)
Life becomes expensive, fast
Many of us lived like broke students, but it was acceptable as a student. I was one of the lucky few that got financial support from my parents while studying. Not to mention, I had a few part-time jobs on campus and student loans helped with the rest. Add all of that up and I lived a pretty decent lifestyle. As an adult, my only report card was my bank statement and it’s tough.
Narcity did a rough breakdown of what kind of salary you’d need to live and have fun in Toronto. They ballparked it at a minimum of $50,000 a year. Something few millennials will make in entry-level positions. Our generation was fed a lot of unrealistic expectations growing up—in the form of pop culture. Even those of us with modest lifestyles can find ourselves in shock over what average living costs.
The modest apartment from Friends that Joey and Chandler lived in? The New York Post estimates that it would cost $3000 per month to rent. That was supposed to be the minimum standard of living we were expecting when we graduated.
Life isn’t just expensive in money, but also time.
There was a concept of full-time work consisting of 40-hours per week. This might be true for some jobs, but many careers go far beyond that. Twenty-somethings are hit hard by reality when they discover that doctors, lawyers, and accountants don’t clock out at five. It can be a shock to the system to learn how much the world expects of you and how unfair it can all feel.
Just when you think it won’t, graduation gets better.
The real world is a tough place, but this video from the legendary John Green helped me through it:
My take away from this video is the quote:
“Even though a baby threw up on my face last night and I slept for like 2 hours, I would still rank last night as better than almost every night of the first two years after I graduated from college.”
After the lifestyle shift, the struggles of modern job applications, the disappointing job interviews and the overwhelmingly expensive world we live in… I started to acclimate to life after graduation.
As months rolled by, I discovered who I was outside of the classroom. I found a job in the rental car industry, which had nothing to do with my education. Little by little, I started to learn the job. I even made a few friends. My body, mind, and spirit got used to the long hours, stress, and monotony. The money was never great, but it did start to get a little better.
I ended up working with several managers who showed me support and helped me become an adult in ways I didn’t think I could. I even started a family and though money is tight, we find a way to make it work and keep trying for a better tomorrow.
There’s no magic answer.
It was a mixture of luck and time. Contrary to what I thought, life right after graduation isn’t about succeeding right away. It’s about survival.
To all the nervous and lost graduates, the best advice I can give you is:
Just get through it.
You will be disappointed at times, and you might even grow cynical. No matter how much you lament your post-secondary education for not better preparing you for the real world after you’ve graduated, you’re going to continue learning. As you push through this transition period, remember your former first-year self—when you were excited to take on the world. We were young, ambitious, and even a little naïve.
You may not feel like the same person now that you’ve graduated, but that naïve little student probably wanted to change the world. And they aren’t going to let you give up.
