Real World Problems: The Truth About Graduating

Real World Problems: The Truth About Graduating

Article by Gwen
|
July 9, 2012
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So, you’ve decided to graduate. You’re leaving cramped corridors and weed smoke to go follow the American dream like a foreigner who has just hopped the fence to freedom. Like the aforementioned illegal alien, you’ll go looking for the fairytale job opportunities and find a sea full of depressed drones under fluorescent lights who won’t hire you unless you’ve got the right papers.

Time for plan B! You set yourself up in your parents’ basement, start a blog and call yourself a freelancer. And the first thing you’ll write will be titled “X things they don’t tell you about life after graduation.”

You’ll spill all two months of your “real world” knowledge into the close-knit interwebs community, where it will sit on page 10,000 of the Google search page behind all the other articles that recent college graduates have written about “the real world.”

Including this one.

We’d bet you breadsticks that your article says something like “there’s no spring break or summer vacation in the real world.” ERRRMEYGAHHHD really? No spring break? Enlighten us, O’ wise explorer; we know nothing of the strange customs of the fully employed!

Frankly, we’re better than that, and we’re here to give you the straight dope. For example, in the real world, no one cares about your college GPA. In fact, no one cares about anything you did in college. No one will hand you his business card because you were co-captain of the ultimate Frisbee team. And everyone knows that the extensive “philanthropy” work you did translates to you dragging your puffy-eyed, wine-headache-riddled self out of bed on a Saturday morning long enough to rake some old dude’s lawn.

Your article might brush upon the fact that you won’t meet your next girlfriend around a room-temperature keg in somebody’s shower. The real truth is it is just plain difficult to get laid in the real world. It takes a lot more than a couple foamy cups of half-tapped party water to get her to take her clothes off. “Real world” citizens demand a partner that has his or her life together and can provide security. Oh, and in the real world, security isn’t defined as a half-burped promise that you won’t draw on someone’s face after they’ve fallen asleep.

On the plus side, if you do find a partner for the sideways salsa, it will become a lot easier to get that rando out of your bed afterwards because his wife is expecting him home at any minute.

Speaking of parties, parties suck in the world without research papers and bubble sheets. First of all, you have to plan every get-together two months in advance so that people’s assistants can forget to save the date in their planners. The actual party will be over at 9 because Sue’s babysitter leaves at ten and Ted can’t drink because of his cholesterol medicine and John has to get up early to get that mole checked out. This leaves you alone in the house with more cheese than you’ll ever know what to do with. Apparently that’s the thing to bring to “real adult” parties: cheese.

Oh, and be prepared for employers and other such well-adjusted adults to attempt to explain things on your level to “help” you with this transition. They’ll say things like, “Working overtime is just like cramming for finals” and, “This key card is just like using a student I.D. to enter the dorms.” That’s right. After some of the greatest minds in your state have given you a piece of paper representing the benefits of all your hard work, people are going to treat you like a kindergartener that just spilled a Capri Sun down his shirt.

So, friends, you have been warned. Stay in school. Forever. Run victory laps until your knees are arthritic and your hips set off metal detectors. Don’t jump the fence. Raise that blue-ribbon adorned can high into the air and repeat after me: Chug. Chug. Chug!