To the recent college grad: It's hard but it's worth it!

Everyone tells you how much your friend group is going to change when you are transitioning from middle school and when you are graduating high school, and they’re so right. But the most drastic transition for me was from college to career.

When you’re 21-25, it life is harder because you expect to have a solid direction and people are constantly asking you where you work, who you are dating and what your next big move is going to be, when their guess is just as good as yours. Those people you partied with at tailgates have kids now. And your roommate in college is planning the wedding of their dreams and you haven’t been on a date since the Vietnam War.

Some of your friends are in full swing of their career while you’re filling out grad school applications. Or maybe you are starting your career and realize you the position you thought would be perfect for you isn’t a good fit at all. This point in your life you are with people that might be the same age but are on completely different pages and it gets a lot harder to keep up.

Things get weird because you start talking about people they’ve never met which makes stories harder to tell. You start posting pictures of people no one has seen before and hanging out at places they have never been. You get busier than you’ve ever been in your life and the snapchats at 9:30 AM take a back seat to the emails you have to send out. You can’t make time for people like you used to and the fun stuff isn’t a priority like it was spring semester of your senior year.

It’s not all bad, It actually really rewarding and I will tell you doing well at work feels better than any A you’ve ever received in your life. You will become friends with people you never otherwise would have met if you were still the person you were a year ago and you find talents you didn’t even know you had.... Like blogging.

Please don’t be scared and don’t feel like a failure when you get rejected from the job you really wanted because at least your foot was in the door. Try to communicate with your friends as much as possible, even if it seems like they haven’t noticed you haven’t talked in 2 weeks. You guys are in very different places and you won’t always “get” each other the same way you did when you were running around at tailgates and struggling in the library. It does not mean you love each other any less.

My best advice is to take as much time as possible getting to know the person you are out of college and don’t be in a rush to be the person you want to be. View every new person, job and event as an opportunity to meet someone or learn something new. The world is much bigger than your college town so get as much out of it as you can, you’re gonna do amazing sweetie!

Xoxo, Hunny!