I feel like it has been forever since I’ve been on the blog, probably because it has been quite a while, thanks for hanging in there with me while I got settled back at home and I’m sorry for keeping y’all waiting for a new post for so long!
We are coming to the end of the season of caps and gowns and graduates saying goodbye to one chapter of their lives and moving on to the next, whether that be college or the real world there are a lot of unknowns about what’s next. Since I graduated college I have gotten more advice from people than I can keep track of. It seems like once I was through with school everyone wanted to impart some tidbit of knowledge that someone else told them when they graduated, some of it was great and helpful and some of it was just truly awful.
graduation announcement via
Of all the advice I’ve been given in the past two years I have to say my favorite piece of post grad advice and the one thing that has stuck with me in the back of my head was something a former coworker said to me when I was laid off. She told me that I didn’t need to know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life at 24 but that I should start figuring out what it is that I don’t want to do.
There’s a few reasons this is my favorite piece of post grad advice and why it has stuck with me. The biggest reason is that I think there is too much pressure on many of us to have it all figured out when we graduate and the truth is very few if any of us actually do have it figured out. How are we expected to know what we want to do with the rest of our lives at 22 years old? I know I didn’t.
I graduated with quite a few student loans from a very expensive degree in politics and not a clue what I wanted to do with that degree. I took the first job offered to me and luckily it was in my field and frankly a dream job, the people I worked for and with were amazing, it was a fast paced and exciting environment with a great company and I was learning a lot. One of the things I was learning, though, was that it was not the field I wanted to be in forever, it was interesting, yes, but not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. That stressed me out more than you can imagine.
Enter my favorite piece of post grad advice. Now is the time we should be trying lots of different things, and if you’ve found something you love that’s amazing, but if you’ve found something you hate that’s perfectly fine as well. It’s normal, it means you’re putting yourself out there and trying different things. I think, most importantly, it means that if something doesn’t work out you’re not getting down on yourself; figuring out what you don’t want to do means you’re one step closer to knowing what it is you do want to do.
