Being a college graduate is great. You’ve spent four years dedicated to your University. People now respect you, and they hopefully consider you an educated, elite member of society. No one can take away the pride and accomplishments you have achieved. And no one can prepare you for what is about to ensue, your graduation. “Are you excited?” …Yes. “Are you sad?”…Yes. “Are you nervous?”…Obviously. It’s true that I had no real answers to these questions, but I did feel prepared for that big day.

After attending Bryant University for four years, along with being an overly involved member of the community, I felt ready to enter the work world.The kicker: no one knows the impact of graduation and how it will affect them until weeks after the ceremony.

It has been four (I keep using that number) weeks since my graduation day. I think the hardest part I am coming to grips with is not having my friends directly around me. Being one of the few to find a job before graduation, I moved to New York City to pursue my career at Nickelodeon. Most of my friends stayed in New England and I’ve noticed it’s difficult to keep in touch with the friends I spent those years sharing everything of my life with—My clothes, my weekends, my room and my life. Shouldn’t this be the easy part?

Yes I am/was prepared to graduate in the sense that I was ready for the next chapter. However, I was not ready for “Graduation.” I distinguish between the two because to graduate is a one day process of disaffiliation, where one receives three hours riddled with goodbyes at a graduation ceremony, and then goes to pack packs and move out of a dorm room/apartment/whatever your dwelling may be. I graduated. How successful you are in the actual “graduation” process is an entirely different story.

Graduation is a transition of finding oneself. It begins immediately after you graduate and are kicked off campus with black garbage bags filled with pep rally paraphernalia, your clothes and random goods you accumulate after those college years. You realize your independence, or loneliness, as you learn to live without the friends, family and the comforts of a community and home environment.They say the day you turn 18 you are officially an adult, but I don’t buy that. At 18 I was very much as immature as the day I turned 16. I think adulthood begins the day of college graduation. You leave a place you have called home for four years, and despite the fact you were away from your parents, you were by no means on your own. You had campus security, your friend and a university infrastructure that provided support and protection against woes of life.Graduation means no more backbone.

As an adult, I am looking for my own apartment. I budget my finances. And no, I do not have homework or pull all-nighters for finals, but I still find myself exhausted after working hard at my career, trying to prove myself as a viable employee.I keep in touch with friends, but “my friends” have become the voice on the other side of the phone line. Like a good book, I was ready for the next chapter but unprepared for what was ahead.

You can take all of the necessary precautions. You can go to career service sessions, accept a job offer, buy an apartment, but until you are actually involved with it a—entering a new and exciting world—you cannot be prepared. Alas, you will learn survival skills quickly, and I have great faith that you will succeed.Life is different and I by no means want to scare anyone, because it’s not too bad. It is new. It is exciting. It is thrilling. It is different. Just don’t take you senior year for granted…Be responsible. Look toward the future. Cherish your friends.

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