What Happens After Graduation? A CIIS Student on the Brink of the Career Hunt

By LOIS SMITH, student in the Writing and Consciousness MFA program and intern in the CIIS Communications Department.

This is the first in a series of blogs that Lois will be writing this fall.

As a little girl, I believed that a career was not something adults had any control over, but rather a winding path that twisted and turned, until, lo and behold, you stumbled upon your dream job.  I think my hippie parents had something to do with this belief.  I distinctly remember my parents’ friends talking about how they “fell into” their career, as one would fall into a hole.

When I graduated from college in 2006--just before the economy tanked-- with a BA in theatre, I naturally assumed that this would happen to me.  I would amble along, experiment with different jobs, and that I would at some point “fall into” my dream job.

Four years later, after a series of dead-end jobs and brief jaunts volunteering abroad, I was still no closer to my dream job than when I graduated. It occurred to me that perhaps my parents and my parents’ friends might have been wrong. Maybe, in order to find my dream job (or, at this point, any job) I had to make choices and do things. No one was going to hand me my dream job, nor was anyone going to hand me any career at all.  If I wanted to find one, I would have to choose something specific, and pursue it on my own.