Spring term is well underway, and midterms are almost here. And soon, come June, the term will be over, and so will be the best four (or five) years of your life. The time has come for you to break free from the protective world of education and your mom's cooking and to find your place in the big, bad world as a functioning member of society.
So, if you're a graduating senior, here are 10 things you're probably feeling as you look for your first real job:
1. You've been working for four (or five) years toward a Bachelor's degree that's supposed to find you a fulfilling career.
The moment of adulthood is creeping up, and you're feeling the pressure to land a super cool and impressive job:
2. You spend several hours every day checking Indeed.com and LinkedIn for new job listings and researching all of your favorite companies.
Yet you still can't find anything respectable or that even comes close to using your degree.
3. Speaking of LinkedIn, you spend weeks obsessively comparing your profile to all of friends' profiles.
You're rewriting and rewording all of your experience, hoping that, this time, it will land you that dream job.
4. Try as hard as you may, you can't escape the endless stream of status updates and life events from your Facebook friends about their brand new, bright and shiny adult jobs.
5. You seriously question whether or not you're qualified to even deliver office mail and pick up coffee orders.
You wonder why you spent the last four years studying (drinking) and stressing when you could have been traveling the world:
6. Once you finally land your first set of interviews, you spend the days leading up to them perfecting all of your answers and your outfits and reviewing all of the wonderful reasons you want to work for their company.
7. You walk out of each interview with a slight burst of confidence.
Which is followed by a debilitating fear that you said something wrong or that you made a bad joke or that they just simply didn't like you and you'll have to start this all over again.
8. You feel down about yourself and about all of your achievements thus far and decide that you must not be as special as your parents said you were.
9. You resign yourself to inevitably getting a job waiting tables, living in your parents' basement, and accepting your seemingly utter lack of potential.
10. Finally, you get a call from one of those interviews you thought you blew, and they want to offer you a real-life adult job with benefits and a salary, and you finally feel like a full-fledged grown-up.
