DOES GRADUATION REALLY SUCK ?

I don’t know. May be I don’t want to know. I like it here.

Graduating from college is hard for a variety of reasons—entering a terrible job market, having a overpriced and underrated degree that will feel like it was written on a toilet napkin, and feeling like a giant question mark(followed by an exclamation mark as well) was placed on top of your life. These are the things that I expect to feel though. These are the things that have been discussed so I am emotionally prepared for the blow. What I am not prepared for, is however, the quiet losses, the little deaths that litter your path when you begin the next stage of your life. Growing up was never this shitty.

This is something we’ve talked a lot about. Did we really spend a hundred grand on college, doing everything we thought we had to do in order to succeed only to end up as a waitress/ intern for a period of time that extends beyond the post-grad grace period. Ok , maybe not a waitress; you have a job? Let me tell you how that is gonna work out for you. You will always be an incompetent slob, whose idea of a good days work is to change the toilet roll. You will be the modern day Shidas, whose touch turns everything into shit. Your payroll will be directly proportional to your sucking upto your boss without gagging, who by the way likes his ego massaged. You will have trouble getting up at 10am in the morning and yet want the “Employee of the Month” award. Again, this is all just a theory.

People are just having a difficult time growing up these days. We suffer from crippling nostalgia brought on by Facebook photo albums and clicking Refresh, we feel cheated by the new modern workplace so we freelance and have a lot of feelings and views instead. This is a moment in culture that belongs only to us. This is our generation’s legacy. Some of you might not relate though.

What’s stranger, is to see such a blatant disconnect between ourselves and our parents though. They came of age and graduated college in a very different time. Their post-grad experience doesn’t resemble ours. We’re seeing a true separation of the generations happening here, right now.

It’s frustrating because we’re perceived as being lazy, which might be only a little bit true. Because now more than ever it seems there’s a pressure to be successful. Pressure from all around the globe. Especially with these damn social networking sites where you can chart people’s professional progress and silently judge them. We’re living life under the microscope that we created so trust us when we say that we do want to BE successful.

I am 22 and will graduate college next year. What irks me is the fact that most of my friends are all still in such different places. Some are traveling, some are unemployed and doing the daily job search we all know and loathe, some are interning, some are straight up in that 9-to-5 grind at a job they hate, some are already entrepreneuring and only five to six of us have landed our dream jobs. No one’s on the same page. Friends are moving, staying, ignoring phone calls, falling in love, breaking up, disappearing. Some friends do happy hour after work, some are sober and go to bed at ten p.m., some of us can go out whenever we want because there’s no job to wake up to. I wonder if/ when this will ever even out. I wonder when/ if we can all find our way back to each other again. That’s the hardest part about graduating college for me—no longer being in the same place as you all were once. We’re all just so far away from each other now and some of us are successful and some of us aren’t and some of us are getting there and some of us may never get there. It makes me miss the days when we were trying to figure out the solutions to Kreyszig.
What’s worse- I miss the guys. You guys.

Ask me, how am I doing and I am more likely to shout profanity rather than exchanging pleasantries with a complimentary hug. More likely to give you the finger rather pay for your beer.
Graduation ? I am pissed.

This quote from Apratim Saha sums it all– “Procrastination was never so much fun, nor will ever be.”