How to Beat the Post-Grad Blues

Congratulations, you graduated! Everything you have worked towards for the past four years (or six, no judging!) has culminated in this single moment. Maybe your family came to the event in person or maybe they watched via web cast. Either way your achievement is a milestone you worked hard on and you deserve a little time off.

It is now July and the novelty of post-grad bliss and summer has worn through. Your gown is currently gathering dust in the dark bowels of your childhood closet and the pomp and circumstance has faded — face it, in reality, you have blown through your Netflix Watch-list. You may be thinking Now What?

If you are not lucky enough to have acquired a job, then welcome to the club of recent college grads enjoying or suffering through their unemployment sanctioned time off. If you find yourself dreading being part of this club, here are some tips to thriving through the post-grad blues.

Get Organized!

If you are an unemployed millennial, there is a good chance that graduation meant moving back into your childhood bedroom. While it may be nice to have your beloved stuffed animal collection back, there is so much other clutter from your childhood and college selves crowding you out of your space.

Getting organized is the first step in post grad thriving. You are in such a different phase of life now than you were a month a go — crazy right! You deserve a fresh start as you embark into young adulthood. A good way to start organizing is using Marie Kondo’s KonMari method. Marie Kondo is the author of two books on tidying. The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, her first book, is a great book for tidying motivation. Spark Joy, her second book, is a much more nuanced and practical guide to tidying up your life and finding joy in it.

Through decluttering your physical space, there is a happy side effect of decluttering your mind. For example, donate your O Chem textbook that you are never going to use or need again, and free your mind from the PTSD the course caused. (Pro tip: Don’t throw out your O Chem textbook if you went into a STEM field and you will still need it.) Decluttering your mind, frees it for more important information and priorities.

Travel

Before joining the 9 to 5 hustle, take the opportunity to travel. Even if you don’t have the budget to travel through Europe, take a road trip somewhere new. Go camping or backpacking. Take this time to explore a new corner of our vast planet. When you get a full time job, you will probably only have two or three weeks of time off and therefore will most likely not have time to travel. If you are lucky, you could travel for business; however, you’ll most likely be stuck in a conference or board room all day instead of actually getting to explore your destination.

If you can’t afford to travel, travel narratives and memoirs are the next best thing. I personally recommend Cheryl Strayer’s Wild. This is a powerful narrative about becoming your best self. This book also makes great travel reading. I recently listened to the audiobook on a road trip from Los Angeles to Sacramento and this book made a great traveling companion.

Intellectually Explore

The saying goes that college is the time to fully explore your intellectual curiosities. Between midterms, part-time jobs, and term papers; who has time to pursue extracurricular intellectual exploration. As an unemployed or under-employed college grad, you have been given the gift of time to pursue these interests. If the history of laundry machines or the monetary policy of Zimbabwe tickles your intellectual fancy, go for it! Take this time to become well-read and better yourself.

Another way to intellectually explore is through taking courses. We are so fortunate to live in a time where there is so much low cost or free access to information. Community colleges are a great low cost option to get a basic knowledge or understanding of a subject for course credit. If you don’t mind forgoing the course credit Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a great free alternative. Edx provides MOOCs from top universities, such as Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkley. Some of these courses come with a certificate for a small administrative fee.

Apps, such as Duolingo, provides a convenient and free way to learn a language. Fluency or Proficiency in another language looks fantastic on a resume and makes you a more desirable job candidate. Duolingo is an easy way to get a baseline knowledge and daily practice for your new language, but taking a foreign language class at a community college or immersing yourself through travel will help you gain a deeper understanding of your new language.

Create the Perfect Resume

The only way to escape unemployment limbo is to up your job search game. That means updating your resume to contain only the most relevant information tailored to your job prospects. While you are upping your resume game you should join LinkedIn to connect with people in your prospective field.

After doing this, begin your job hunt. Check general job sites such as indeed.com, and industry specific job sites everyday to find places to apply. Set a goal for yourself to send out five, ten, or twenty applications per day; and wait and see what you get back. Keep in mind, through the average job hunt, if you apply to one hundred jobs, you’ll interview for two to three and get offered one. That means 97 to 99% of your applications will fail. Through persistence you’ll eventually land a job and you’ll join the club of employed post grads. Congrats!