Dear Graduate: By the numbers

Dear Graduate,

What an exciting time for you! This past weekend you graduated, celebrated with friends and family and toasted the accomplishment of receiving a degree. After a 4.5 hour ceremony you walked across that stage, shook the hands of lots of people wearing robes and weird hats and took your diploma and entered into the real world.

Now that you have ‘officially’ entered the real world, let me give you some real world advice. If you decided to wait until the Monday after graduation to look for a job and are suddenly filled with a sense of desperation and terror…well, you are an idiot. Your sense of urgency and lack of planning does not constitute an emergency for anyone else.

Please take the below nuggets of advice to heart, once you are done crying to your parents about how mean that one lady was on the internet you can go out and be semi-successful

• 4. That is how many years ago you should have been setting up internships, reaching out to potential mentors and researching the industry you hope to some day be a part of.
• 2. That is the minimum of internships you should have done in college….and if you expected payment and a ribbon for doing what you absolutely need to do to succeed…well real life is going to be hella hard on you.
• 1. The site you should have set up that showcases your writing, experience, references and blogging capabilities.
• 3. The number of student orgs you should be involved in to build a personal network that will support you through career searches and moves.
• 1. The length of time (1 year) that you should begin searching for a job, reaching out to local companies and sitting down with local leaders.
• 1.5 mil. The amount of thank you notes you will write over your  years in college. Thank you notes better be your norm, because the world doesn’t exist to serve you.

I hope you take this to heart, dear graduate. I am a small business owner and if you expect me to find time to chat with you about wanting to join my team then you should know my company is 834, not 854, 438 and my name is Kim, not Jill or To Whom It May Concern.

You were taught research skills in college, use them or expect life to be very, very hard.

Sincerely,

The person that won’t return your calls, answer your emails or respond to your mailed resume and portfolio.