Post-Grad Prix

Here’s the silver lining: For the first time in 15 or so years, you’ve got real, unbridled free-dom. Here’s the catch: It can be the crippling kind of freedom. At first it feels like the last 10 minutes of High School Musical 3: so, so many feelings pinching you from all sides. A diploma, a handshake and an obligatory bow, and you finally see what you’ve made out of yourself. And then reality sets in and invites the post grad conundrum: what now?

To put it in sleepover terms, graduating is the best feeling in the world finafreakingly, you’ve crossed the finish line. You can take a lengthy vacation. Or staycation, even. Forget Vitamin C’s Friends Forever. Crank up T.I.’s Whatever You Like or put on Kanye’s Graduation, for some poetic timing. Right? That’s just the thing. The party ends at some point. When you’ve cashed in your grad money or ticked off your parents by being the resident bum, there’s that five-letter word again, hovering as if you didn’t try to bury it along with your old papers: money.

Quick pro quo

In a culture like ours, getting a job to earn a living isn’t only for personal, life-sustaining purposes, it’s also about settling a score. Your parents (and God forbid, I hope they don’t) may not have accounted for every expense, but the expectations exist. Funny how they’re most palpable after graduation. “Maybe you should start saving” is how my parents sugarcoat it. “Maybe you’d like to pay for gas? Or dinner?” that’s my parents starting to lay it on thick.

Responsibility. That’s another post-grad post-operative word. We’re suddenly thrust into its bosom, fully aware that we can’t milk it anymore. The age of silver spoons and steady allowances, kaput and a feeling of antsy suspension begins. You’re not ready for a nine-to-five gig, but economic insecurity creeps in and compels you to take the road very much traveled that of being financially independent. Come on, “funemployment” can only be fun and funny for so long. Hey you, labor forced, let the Hire Me Hunger Games begin.

Me, Myself and I Inc.

Appraising the job jungle is just as important as making sure your résumé’s a sharp dagger. The hunt for success and security has seen a shift in recent years; from rising corporate ladders to just constructing your own building. Hire me, still but hire me, as in myself. The Internet’s posing a constellation of possibilities for us, and folks like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Dan Porter, the creator of Draw Something, have become the new paragons of success. The self-made kind. Which raises the question: has globalization bruised us so badly that we’ve adapted to internalized employment?

2012 could be a year that many more fresh grads will attempt to be their own bosses. This will neither be an unusual or discouraged pattern, because while technology aids us, our bizarrely inherited sense of entitlement enables us more. We might realize that we’ve forged the right path, or slapped with the fact that we’re too bossypants for our own good.

Self-employed or not, this post-adolescent in-between’s a great equalizer. We’re vulnerable, out of our academic element and clearly lost in the gray area. We will second-guess ourselves and whatever foundation we built in college. We’ll be jealous of friends with lucrative jobs. We’ll care about what our friends with lucrative jobs think of ours. We’ll debate about whether we should “sell our souls.” We’ll be shell-shocked and culture-shocked; our egos will be punched in the gut with nothing to cushion the blow, and we’ll rouse to rude awakenings. I say let it.

Because here’s another upside: we’re young and we’ve got time to recover when we lose our bearings. Isn’t that the ultimate consolation prize of being in your 20s being able to make mistakes? Don’t delude yourself into thinking that you’re about to have a pre-quarter-life or existential crisis because of a couple of failed ventures. Embrace the fear and may we never go too far without it, because it’ll keep us on our feet we won’t settle and we’ll just keep at it. To us fresh grads, may the odds be ever in our favor. There’s no better time to be hopeful.