Post Grad

The onset of May means many things. Among them: 2^nd Quarter property taxes are due; spring weather, which has had many false starts locally this year, should finally stick; and graduation season has arrived. The last of those three comes particularly to mind since I need to find a college graduation present for someone before Saturday. When I first heard the date it seemed to me that May 6 was early for that ceremony, but memory deceived me. A glance at my browning-with-age degree, which regrettably is not really made of sheepskin (trivia: lignin in wood pulp causes the brown aging effect), shows that even in ancient times the schedule was about the same.

Except for the date, I remember both my high school and college graduations quite well along with the few days before and after. In both cases the prevailing sensation was anticlimax. I remember walking back to my dorm after my very last class at GWU while thinking to myself, “I should be feeling more than this.” It just felt like any other stroll that I had taken on that sidewalk 1000 times before. Anticlimax was perhaps more understandable four years earlier. While I looked forward to moving on from a rural prep school with 100 students to an urban campus with thousands, it was still fundamentally just a prospect of more school. So it proved to be. The biggest difference was the city. Had I chosen a less urban campus I might have noticed little change at all. The end of college was a different matter altogether, but that didn’t sink in right away. It did a few months later.

Graduation Blues is a well-known phenomenon. For more than a dozen years the graduate’s life had been demarcated by school. Progress was clearly defined by grade and by grades. Suddenly, that’s over. There is no progress other than what one defines for oneself. Personal anomie is a common initial response. While there are good reasons for some folks to go on to graduate school for various academic, scientific, and technical career paths, more than a few post-grads opt for more school not for any of those good reasons but just to delay facing its end. Whenever it comes, the transition from academia to career is seldom easy. There are rare cases of instant success – the current version of Cinderella – as some princely corporation offers a high-paying position directly out of college because, so to speak, the shoe fits, but the key word is “rare.” The typical experience is struggle – often a lifelong struggle – that at least at some point is likely to involve serving coffee and/or wielding a shovel. Upward mobility is a possible but not guaranteed long-term outcome.

Then there is the sensation of backsliding. Independence at college is more often illusory than real. There are still people today who work their own ways through college, but most youths rely heavily on parents, scholarships, and loans. Nonetheless, independence feels real as one lives away from home “as an adult.” That, too, ends suddenly. Typically, the graduate is back living with parents in a way no different than when a teenager. Nor is there any certain upcoming date as to when that might change. Besides, the grad probably owes a teensy amount of money in student loans, and the lender will be sending its first love notes requesting payment. It’s no wonder graduates get the blues or even full-blown depression.

I’d like to offer Pollyanna “here’s how to turn it all around” advice, but I really don’t have any. Graduation Blues are just a normal phase that some people get past quickly and others slowly. We do get past them though. Most of us eventually get our footing and get the hang of life beyond school. This does have its pleasures, not the least of which is real independence. Not much will be free, but we can be free nonetheless. That counts for more than a 4.0 average ever did.

Alice Cooper – School’s Out