Beating the New Grad Slump

Or, how to live life with intent in your early 20s

A friend recently pointed out after watching How to Be Single that it was the first movie she had seen in a while to empathize with the challenges of navigating life as a new grad. Most movies, she felt, either focused on college or full-blown adulthood, the two stages of life bookending the blurry transition we found ourselves in, marked by milestones like celebrating your 21st birthday or having your first child. What milestones do we have? What characteristics define the new grad experience?

Since my conversation with my friend, I’ve thought a lot about my own transition, which has not been easy and continues to challenge me in unexpected ways. Over time, I’ve realized that the challenges I face are not unique. They are the natural growing pains that come with moving to a new city, shifting from student to professional, learning to adopt a new rhythm and pace of life.

Fortunately, I have been surrounded by fantastic and supportive people, who have helped me smooth and untangle my transition. So, I have begun to collate my learnings into actionable strategies. These are the lessons I want to carry forward with me, and I hope by sharing them with you, you will also feel better prepared to face similar challenges head-on.

Strategy #1: Maintain Personal OKRs

The week before moving to San Francisco, I opened up a new note on my iPhone and wrote down a list of goals for myself. They included things like:

- read 3–5 articles per day about environmental politics and climate change
- spend time writing each week
- read a book every two weeks

Within two months of trying to check off all the boxes, I fell behind a little, then a lot, and quickly gave up on trying. Consequently, I lost work-life balance. I easily fell into the habit of working late nights at the office when I didn’t have other commitments to hold myself accountable to. As a student, I had kept up a firehose intensity of classes and extracurriculars each semester; I couldn’t understand why I was unable to maintain the same magnitude of productivity in work life and anxiously wondered if I was slowly falling into complacency.

This is a common struggle among peers, which leads me to believe it stems from the system, not the individual. Life as a college student is very structured. Your four years are neatly divided into semesters and summers, and you are given a clear roadmap for progressing through them. Your major dictates what classes you need to take and which order to take them in, your syllabi break down how to pursue your subject material. On top of all of this, everything that you do as a student is for your personal growth. (I definitely took this for granted.)

As a full-time employee, no one sets the rhythm, direction, or scope of your goals for you. Plus, your time and energy is divided between yours and your company’s advancement.

The open-endedness and increased responsibility of work life make it easy to let each month bleed into the next without focused personal growth.

I was taking a step in the right direction to combat this challenge when I wrote down some goals. The problem was I didn’t frame them correctly. Recently, I sat down with my manager to talk about my personal work OKRs. OKR stands for Objective Key Result, which is a structured technique for setting and communicating goals. After looking at some of the OKRs I drafted, he pointed out that I was focusing too much on process and not enough on results.

As an example, he rewrote “spend 1/2 a day each week learning this software” to “become the company expert in this software.” The latter, he explained, establishes an outcome to the question, What does success for Karen look like at the end of three months? The former instead tries to predict the actions I should take to achieve an outcome that I don’t define.

I realized that this was the exact pitfall I had stumbled into when first defining my personal life goals. So I went back to the drawing board. Here’s an example of how I changed “spend time writing each week” from a process-driven goal into a result-driven OKR.

for March 1 — June 1, 2016
Objective: Build strong portfolio of writing pieces
- earn an A on final writing assignment for online journalism course
- post two new high-quality (read-to-view ratio >60%) articles on Medium
- publish an article in a professional publication

Strategy #2: Just Ask

I don’t know how many times in the last several months I’ve tripped myself up by not asking for help. My natural instinct is to brood over challenges by myself. But the human experience follows predictable patterns, so someone you know has likely gone through similar tribulations and can help you out.

A close friend reminded me of this valuable piece of advice about a month ago when I told her I was grappling with the question, “Where do you want to be professionally in five years?” She immediately asked me if I had talked to any people within the careers that I was interested in. Busted. I had not. Under her encouragement and the suggestions of others, I began emailing career advice inquiries to my college alums to leverage my existing network.

As they predicted, I received a slew of responses. Alums were more than happy to talk with me about their careers and mine. Additionally, they directed me to more resources and offered to connect me with people in their networks.

Information and relationships that would have taken me months, even years to find and develop on my own, were suddenly at my fingertips after a few hours of asking the right people the right questions.

The “just ask” principle also applies beyond major life questions. A month after moving to San Francisco, I began searching for a public working spot that made me productive. My search ended pretty quickly. After not liking my visit to the Public Library and discovering that most of the neighborhood coffee spots didn’t provide wifi on the weekends, I concluded that there were no places in the entirety of San Francisco that met my needs. In hindsight, this conclusion is comically embarrassing. I never thought to ask other people for help because I assumed that my need to work in quiet, public spaces was specific to my weird introverted self.

Of course, I was proved wrong. Several months after giving up my search, I mentioned my futile quest to a friend at work. She immediately sent me a link to a public map cataloguing all of the best coffee places in SF with wifi, roomy tables, and an ambience conducive to productivity.

Strategy #3: Develop Mentors at Work

The case for developing mentors is similar to the case for asking questions. It fast tracks your growth. The main difference is mentors can advise you on your unknown unknowns. For example, when my manager pointed out my goals were process- rather than results-driven, he revealed weaknesses in my approach that I was unaware existed. This is not unique to work life.

When I first began my full-time job, however, I made the mistake of assuming that mentorship would just befall me as I passively waited around. In college, your professors, TAs, and advisors are paid to teach and mentor you––it’s their job.

In contrast, at work, mentorship is not written under anyone’s job description, and coworkers that choose to mentor you are really taking the extra mile to invest in your personal growth.

Do not wait around passively for this. You may be lucky to have amazing coworkers that reach out to mentor you anyway (as I did), but you should be proactive regardless about developing strong relationships with them, showing your eagerness to learn from them, and showing your gratitude for the extra effort that they take to help you. By the same token, do not be afraid to ask for more mentorship. (Again, this ties back to “just ask.”) Your company and your coworkers want you to succeed because that in turn helps the company succeed. I was particularly timid about asking for more mentorship when I first joined the company but I really shouldn’t have been. The moment I voiced my desire, my company made sure it happened.

Finally, mentorship is not a one way street; you should seek to add value to your mentor just as they do for you. This is why I use the word “develop” and not “find”. Over time I have realized that my strongest mentor relationships are built upon mutual investment, understanding, and trust. If you’re uncertain what value you can bring to your mentor, “just ask.” Sheryl Sandberg echoes this sentiment in Lean In. When Lori Goler, then the senior director of marketing at Ebay, called Sheryl to apply to Facebook, she kicked off the conversation with, “What is your biggest problem and how can I solve it?” It blew Sheryl away. Lori’s question immediately demonstrated her commitment to bringing value to Sheryl and in turn made Sheryl trust and commit to Lori.

Quite simply, this all sums to the fact that it is up to you to develop the mentors you want. If you would like someone to be your mentor, invite them to coffee, dinner, drinks, and start getting to know them as a person. Then ask them how you can help them succeed and follow through.

Strategy #4: Say Thank You

At every stage of my life, I have been reminded of how powerful a simple expression of gratitude can be. My time fresh out of school has been no different. Particularly, as I have started reaching out more for help from coworkers or career advice from alums, I have been prompted time and again to never assume what kinds of opportunity costs people make in order to commit time to me.

For example, once I asked a coworker to review a document I had drafted and later found out he stayed at work an extra hour past midnight to provide me timely feedback. Similarly, I have discovered that many of the alums who have eagerly responded to my requests for help are in between business trips, parenting, and late nights at the office. Be very intentional about saying thank you always and often.

Along the same vein, it goes a long way to show people appreciation regardless of whether they have recently done you a favor. My senior year of college, I sent a thank you note to my high school college counselor on Thanksgiving. Her reply demonstrates how much joy a few well thought out sentences can bring to people.

Strategy #5: Smile

This one’s simple. One of my lovely photographer friends did a photoshoot of me last week, and over the course of two hours she probably prompted me to “smile more” at least fifteen times. Of course, she was just talking about the photoshoot, but it got me thinking — is there a biological advantage to smiling more? Turns out there is.

Smiling improves your health, happiness, and emotional response to challenging situations. So really, sometimes a smile is all it takes to set yourself on the right foot forwards.

This is a lesson I’ll take to heart.