By Brandon Hunt

The “real world.” If you’ve gone your whole life believing what MTV tells you, then those two words would mean drinking and partying 24 hours a day while living in beautiful mansions in exotic locations with a group of beautiful people with chiseled abs. Well, if you did choose to live the first 21 or so years of your life believing in MTV’s form of “reality,” then senior year of college, and more specifically the last few months before graduation, are certainly a scary wake up call.

As a future graduate of Clark University, the last four years of my life have consisted of Madden games, trips down the street to the Blarney Stone (the local pub that serves as a home away from home for us Clark kids) and lots of late night General Tsao’s chicken gorges from Park Chinese (which ~ in a brilliant marketing move ~ is located right next door to the Blarney). All of my friends’ recent history has been pretty much this way, too. The whole “30 is the new 20” maturity theory had better prove true because I don’t think the path from adolescence to manhood includes playing Playstation and eating excessive amounts of leftover Chinese food.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been working hard as well. My parents have always told me to place a great deal of importance on academics in order to achieve something that they never had the opportunity to: a college degree. I adhered to those words of wisdom and now here I am, just a few short days from reaching that goal. However, it is also during this exciting time that I ~ and the majority of my senior peers at Clark as well as on countless other campuses around the nation ~are beginning to seriously ask ourselves one very important question: “Well, just what am I going to do after graduation?”

The obvious (and by far the most repeated) answer to that question is “Get a job.” However, if one thing about post-college life is certain, it’s that it is not nearly as simple as that succinct sentence would seem to imply. Indeed, I often hear college graduates describe the first few years after college as a period that is dominated by uncertainty. It’s a time when you want to get out into the workforce and distance yourself from financial dependence on your parents. However, it is also a time when the average grad is faced with an abundance of loans (college and otherwise) starting to come due. In other words, the average grad is hopelessly broke. So of course, this sense of financial uncertainty/burden is just a little overwhelming.

However, as uncertain as this time in your life may be, it is also a time of freedom.. It is a time when you aren’t yet immersed in a full-fledged career, you don’t have a husband/wife/kids yet, no mortgage, etc. Basically, you don’t have nearly as many responsibilities as you will later on in life. The time after you graduate is one of the only periods in your life that you actually have the freedom to do anything you want. You can apply for a job in Miami or look at graduate schools in Europe. Basically, you can choose to go anywhere on the planet (that financial thing notwithstanding).

As a prospective graduate (with May 18th suddenly in the very near future) of course I am feeling anxious about life after college. However, by envisioning the post graduation years as a time of freedom I have found that I can alleviate some of the natural anxiety that accompanies this time period. After all, I have spoken with 40 year olds that claim they still don’t know what they want to do as far as their careers are concerned. While by no means would I recommend skipping job fairs and interviews in the months preceding graduation, I feel as though it is important to keep this whole transition period in proper perspective. The truth is that the career that you choose right after college will most likely not be the career that you keep for the rest of your life. If in fact the uncertainty won’t change as you grow older, you might as well embrace it.

Editor’s Note: Please join us in congratulating our Pulse intern seniors Brandon Hunt (Clark University) and Alison Zawadski (Assumption College) on their upcoming graduations. We wish you both the best of luck and much happiness in this next chapter of your lives!