Letdown Often Follows College Graduation

Reality Sets In for Former UC Student

By: Tim Freeman

Posted: 12/6/07

As graduation time nears for some of the students at UC it is worth exploring the common phenomenon known as post-graduation letdown. No doubt you all have your hands full with paper deadlines, sports practices, club meetings as well as homework assignments that can require you to read up to two books per week. Many Utica College students balance these academic responsibilities with one or more off-campus jobs which make it necessary to engage in tedious commutes back and forth across town (wasted study time). Then there are the romantic relationships that need tending to (more wasted study time), family responsibilities (hugely wasted study time) and leisure and party time to consider.

College can seem like a heavy burden or a sacrifice when this juggling act is fully realized by the young and inexperienced person in their early twenties or the older adult who is determined not to stand behind a till for the rest of his or her life. Four year academic programs are challenging, to say the least, and they require an extraordinary amount of focus and discipline.

The reflective glimpses that occasionally occur throughout the frenetic rush of your college lives are the sweetest. They exist like glass dome worlds inside of a wind tunnel. You may be reading about zygotes when all of a sudden you have a yen for a peaceful time down the road. You can't wait for the day when you will not be plagued by deadlines that seem to be engraved in stone, interminable books with boring plots and lectures by professors that delve into abstract realms of deep substance but appear to offer no transferable relevance to the real world of mortgages, computer glitches and screaming infants.

When I envisioned the post-college/bachelor's degree world my mind conjured up images of tree-lined streets and happy couples driving in safe, realistically sized vehicles to their rewarding jobs that offered competitive salaries and excellent fringe benefits. Sometimes I even saw a yellow brick road forking into numerous other brick roads all leading to open doorways. I know I am not the first person to have these visions, and I will not be the last.

In my mind-as I'm sure in the minds of millions of other people-these visions are the reason why we strive for a college degree. We want to live comfortably and have enough necessities and amenities to keep us happy, healthy and wise. I think it is important at this point to mention an important and harsh reality: these visions of a post-college degree world can sometimes be a mirage.

What awaits the recent college graduate is the competitive (and uneven) gridiron of the tedious job search. Cover letters, sloppy resume first-drafts, revised resumes and interview books will accumulate on your desk like so many paper leaning towers of pizza. You will spend countless hours culling the web for that one job that speaks specifically to you only to be daunted by the fact that dozens of other people will be applying for the same position. The stinging consternation you will experience when you are rejected from that first dream job is likely to fill you with embarrassing shame. The average rejection letter is tantamount to being informed of several facts of which you were previously unaware: you are not good enough or smart enough, you are unskilled, you are inexperienced and you are not "the right type."

None of your professors will ever tell you these things while you are in college.. Since the college atmosphere is one of intellectual exploration there can rarely be any wrong answers. Every paper you write and every comment you make is received for what it is-a contribution to the never-ending search for knowledge. The work world is not as amorphous and abstract and it is sometimes rarely even intellectual.

The job search can sometimes seem as futile as Michael Moore's quest for the mysterious and ever elusive GM chairman in the documentary film Roger & Me. Since job hunting is ultimately a number's game (the more jobs you apply to the more likely you are to be hired) the entire process can feel like gambling. The frustrating and stressful realities of the job search are the first manifestations of the post-graduation letdown.

The second most heinous manifestation of the post-graduation letdown has to do with the inordinate amount of idle time you will have on your hands once you have submitted your applications are sitting back waiting for the phone to ring. You may shudder as you feel yourself becoming domesticated when you discover that a productive day now consists of doing the laundry, buying groceries, going to the gym and, of course, writing and sending one cover letter.

A day like this would be a dream day if you were still in college, but you will quickly come to take this newly acquired lack of structure for granted. You may start to feel yourself becoming Will Freeman, the protagonist from Nick Hornby's novel About a Boy. As an unemployed man in his 30s, Will's, "way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of thirty minutes." Will's diurnal life is reduced to a series of half hour activities such as bathing, tidying the apartment, cooking and doing crossword puzzles. Ultimately, he is forced to ask that since, "Life [takes] up so much time . . . how [can] one work and, say, take a bath on the same day?"

The lack of structure the recent graduate experiences is at once both liberating and unhealthy. Every college graduate deserves a brief vacation once they've completed their exacting degree requirements; however, this vacation has the potential to disrupt the tremendous amount of momentum that you acquire during college. What may start out as a brief hiatus from responsibility can turn into a protracted sojourn into the realm of leisuredom. What is more, this process can quickly become a vicious cycle: the longer your life is unstructured, the more you feel unqualified and unprepared to return to the work world.

I experienced the aforementioned signs of post-graduation letdown after I graduated in December of '06. Thanks to a five figure monetary windfall from my grandmother I did not find myself in dire straits to find a job right away. I halfheartedly submitted my resumes along with what I thought were well written cover letters to a few jobs only to be turned down. I dawdled for too long and became depressed, bored and restless. When I finally started substitute teaching last May I found the return to work sluggish. In the interim between subbing I worked on my writing and got a poem and an essay published in two respectable writing publications. In addition to the rejection letters from employers I also had to read rejection emails from numerous publications that passed on writing which I had submitted to them. Half a year after graduation it seemed as if getting my momentum back up to speed was an uphill battle.

I presently have two jobs: I am a substitute teacher and I work nights at one of the local public libraries. I still plug away at the job applications and the writing submissions but it feels more like a number's game than anything else at this point. I have honed my job hunting strategies and I am better able now to address my qualifications in cover letters than I was nearly a year ago. With library work, substitute teaching and published writing to add to my resume I now have a better chance of being hired than if I was fresh out of college. If this one year assessment sounds positive that is because it is. I could still be unemployed and living off of my grandmother, or, even worse, I could be sitting on a median strip with a cardboard sign reading "Will Write for Food."

I will still assert, however, that compared to now I had much more momentum and I was five times as structured while I was in college. Two years ago I envisioned myself working at a salaried job and owning a late model vehicle. I'm making more than I used to make as an hourly employee at a supermarket but I am nowhere near to the thirty or forty thousand dollar benchmark I dreamed of as an undergraduate. My writing gives me the most satisfaction but it can still be considered only an avocation at this point.

I never dreamed that the post-college letdown could be so anticlimactic. If college is an exciting and enjoyable experience the average college student naturally assumes that their first job will be even more exciting and enjoyable. Unfortunately, that was not the case for me and it most likely won't be the case for you either. Some of you reading this will not experience a post-graduation letdown at all and that is okay. People like you are either too smart or too resourceful to ever experience this popular phenomenon. But most of you who go out into the world with your degrees scrolled up in your hands will find yourself pining for those college days when all of the sheltered structure of the college atmosphere seemed to promise big things.

I am confident that I will eventually see my vague dreams materialize into reality. I think the post-graduation letdown is simply a case of finding one's way once the gates of the microcosm that is college have opened up and you have been set free. The real world is often more cut and dried than academia and in some ways this probably accounts for the post-graduation letdown many former students experience. If there is one thing all of us gain from a college education, however, it is an ability to analyze conceptual ideas. This, more than anything, is the only foundation one needs to live a successful life in the real world.

Never underestimate the value of your college education: you now know how to prioritize, you are a skilled multitasker, you can withstand the pressures of deadlines and you have sophisticated reading comprehension and writing skills. You are smart, you are determined and you are resourceful. Make sure to fill up your Netflix queue after you get yourself down to Circuit City to buy some resume and cover letter template software-you are going to need some distracting entertainment to nurse your post-graduation letdown.