My Advice for New Grads
Life lessons for your first year after college graduation
This past weekend I looked on as my social media timelines were flooded with pictures of new college graduates. The pictures brought back pleasant memories of my own college graduation a year and a half ago.
As millions of undergraduate, graduate & doctoral students collectively make the trip across the stage in the coming weeks, they will move on into the “real-world” and enter into a new stage of life.
Some of the last pieces of wisdom they receive on campus will be from commencement speakers who have achieved great things in life. While these speeches are often inspiring, they aren’t necessarily the most important or relevant topics for graduates to be hearing.
Most of the speakers are long removed from college, so their dialogues tend to be much more meta and their advice too abstract for graduates to actually utilize.
So for the purpose of this post, I am going to go super narrow, and focus on advice for graduates’ first year after college.
Pick up the phone
At each stage of your life, you will have to deal with greater network dispersion. The shift from high school to college may have felt dramatic, but in reality, most people kept the same home base.
After college, the dispersion of your network will become exponentially greater. Not only do you have family & childhood friends to keep up with, but also new friends from college. You may also find that your career lands you in a different timezone than most of your friends and family.
All of this is to say that it becomes even more important to pick up the phone and call those that you care about, especially your first few months after college.
Despite having cutting edge technology at our finger tips, it’s surprisingly easy to never reach out to some of our friends in distant places. Don’t fall victim to this trend. Get in the habit of regularly picking up the phone and calling people.
I’d even recommend taking it one step further and using video chat if you can. Seeing an individual’s face makes a huge difference in maintaining connections over time & distance.
Keep broadening your horizons
This lesson is a bit more abstract, but in general I suggest that you utilize your first year out of college to explore topics, places and hobbies that you may not have been exposed to in college.
One of the downsides of college is that it’s really easy to put on blinders. You spend so much of your time concentrating on specific areas, that you limit your exposure to other parts of life.
Sometimes the best next step is horizontal, or even backwards, in order to reach your desired destination.
Overall, the education system in America is very linear. However, the rest of life is far from linear. Take advantage of your time immediately after college to reflect on where you actually want to go next. Sometimes the next step is horizontal, or even backwards, in order to reach your desired destination.
Two of the best ways I’ve found to broaden your horizons are: 1)Reading & 2) Traveling. Reading is a very low friction method of learning about new things. If there’s something you’ve ever been interested in, try picking up a book on that subject.
Similarly, traveling is another great way to open up your mind. While it is a little more involved than reading, traveling is the best way to meet people from different backgrounds.
Get your finances in order
There are very few things in this life that are virtually irreversible, however your finances are one of the few exceptions to this rule. If you don’t take your finances seriously out of college, it can truly limit your opportunities in the future.
Starting with debt, it’s important to limit how deep of a hole you get yourself into. Many college students today will be saddled with debt upon graduation. It’s crucial to limit this anchor by becoming aware of interest rates and long term effects of debt. Set up a payment plan that works for you and limits that total amount you pay over time.
Another area that often gets overlooked is saving/investing. Due to the power of compound interest, every year you put this off could cost you exponentially large sums of money.
Unfortunately, our education system does a poor job of teaching financial literacy, however your first year out of college is a critical juncture for you to fill in the gaps.
Start by tackling the low hanging fruit first. If your company offers a solid 401K plan, max it out. Set up automatic deposits to investment accounts by leveraging products such as Wealthfront or Acorns. Increase your credit score by taking simple steps such as lowering your credit utilization or opening up additional accounts.
Over time you can start diving into more complex areas of investing and saving, but you should start with at least the basics right away. If you don’t you will be in for a very rude awakening in a few years.
Check out: The 7 Financial Mistakes of Young Adults
Make sure you are enjoying life
Do the things you need to do, when you need to do them, so that one day you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.
Up until this point in your life, most of the things you’ve done are likely things you were told to do. Graduate high school, get a degree, find a job, these are things we are told we have to accomplish, and in some sense it’s true. However, the time immediately after college is an ideal point to reflect deeply on what you actually want to do.
While I know this isn’t true for every college graduate, the vast majority of you are entering a brief window in time where you have no one to take care of other than yourself. Now is the time in your life where you have the freedom to be selfish about your time, make your own decisions & do what makes you happy.
It’s easy to forget that this time period is fleeting. In a few years many of you will settle down, get married and start families. Your decision making process will suddenly have bounds again and you won’t be able to put yourself first always.
Of course it’s not always as straight-forward as picking what makes you the happiest at each moment in time. It’s a delicate balancing act between managing responsibilities, finances and opportunities; all while still trying to maximize your enjoyment in life.
My main point is that you have two powerful forces on your side: time and freedom. If you can learn to leverage these to their full advantage, you will find that it’s much easier to enjoy your life than you ever imagined.
Congrats to the class of 2018!
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