After one last spelling and grammar check, I drug my cursor over to the File tab to print my very last undergraduate college paper. Bending over emotionlessly in my desk chair, I grabbed several pages of public relations recommendations from the mouth of my printer.
My eyes had been glued to the screen for hours, but not anymore. I turned the bundle of papers right side up and not too soon after detected a glaring error. I quickly scrolled back through the paper, fixed the error, and raced over to the file tab to print, but this time was met with a resistant orange glow.
My printer had stopped working. After fumbling around for a few seconds trying to mentally sort out my printing options. I quickly got up from my chair, smoothed down my hair and headed over to the fast-casual dining hall to finish my print job. As usual, the lines were long and filled with late teens and early twenty-somethings attempting cram in one last late night meal.
Walking through the door for what I knew would be one of the last times felt like completing a secret time-traveling mission, the future and the present had caught up to each other. Very rarely do we recognize the “good ole days” as the good ole days, but when we do, its an experience that cuts deep into our perception of reality leaving an unmistakable tingling in our souls.
This is it. It’s over.
A few days later, I woke up at home to a cleansing spring breeze and an almost-Summer sunny day. My eyes opened to a different ceiling, a new horizon and a changing season.
It had ended just as quickly as it started.
Graduation day was anticlimactic but held a strong-silent power. My college was the last to graduate in the university and the smallest. There were empty chairs left over from the other graduations that happened earlier that week.
We went in, got our names called, heard a few speeches and that was that. I didn’t have a job lined up, but went through my last three months bearing a big secret. I barely told anyone.
I had gotten into graduate school, a graduate school linked to one of the best universities in the country.
Being part public relations major drew many multi-level marketing companies to my email inbox. Many times I didn’t know what was up until I went through unlikely job scenarios like group interviews or meetings at random locations.
One day, when I went back to my off-campus apartment to finish moving out the rest of my things, I got a phone call. It was from a small, family-run company on the outskirts of town.
Turns out, it was more than a phone call. It was a phone interview. I thought I did pretty good, at least better than the last one where they called hours earlier than expected, in-between classes.
A little while later, I went in for a face-to-face interview and right after Independence Day, I had a marketing job at a for-profit company which I later realized was rare in my region.
It was a fresh, fun environment with pizza Fridays, weekly happy hours, monthly birthday parties, wedding and baby showers and holiday parties. It took an hour for me to get there by bus and train, thirty minutes to get to my graduate campus back from work and thirty minutes home after a two hour, thirty minute class, but it was worth it.
It was all worth it.
Kindly,
The Post Graduate
ourpostgraduatelife.com 