3 Tips for Wrapping Up Your Student Life Journey
So here you are, at the end of your school life. What a journey it has been, eh? You’re probably walking down the aisle, parents and teachers beaming with pride, cheesy graduation song playing from the loudspeakers, relief in your mind, thinking that you’ve just overcome the hardest challenge in your life.
Well, kid, your life has just begun. Welcome to the real world.
Time to wrap up your incubation period and face adulthood responsibilities. But first, before you throw your cap in the air in jubilation, follow these tips to close your school journey wisely and to position yourself better for the next stage of your life.
Host a Postgraduation Party
Remember all those group projects? Were it not for your group members, with whom you’ve shared ink, sweat, and tears throughout the years, you never would have made it to the end.
Before you jump over to the next chapter in life, spare some time for your fellows. Whether they’ve graduated or they’re still working toward it, you all deserve one more night together before walking down your separate roads.
So organize a postgraduation party. Invite all those who’ve helped you earn your diploma. Prepare some memorable graduation party favors to celebrate and commemorate your shared ordeals and triumphs. Raise a glass to freedom, and make a toast to enduring friendship!
Link Up with Your Fellow Graduates
One thing you have to realize is that, more often than not, a successful career means having a good network of acquaintances. The right person at the right time can vouch for your character, boosting your efforts, or they may present profitable opportunities that can be valuable for a business.
Thus, the aforementioned postgraduation party can be a great time to make a promise to stay in touch with one another. After all, your closest friends in school often linger to become your most cherished chums even after decades have passed.
Even if their own jobs are irrelevant to your own, it will still be nice to have friends at your side, there to support you, to applaud your rise, or to cushion your stumble and lift you back again.
Stay Connected with Your Teachers
Your network doesn’t have to be limited to your schoolmates. Your teachers too can remain part of your life, much like how they’ve been a major factor to your education, except this time they’ll be in the background, witnessing their pupil fit into the world and influencing it.
As always, your teachers can provide much-needed insight that you can apply to life in general. They have so much to teach you, matters that are outside the standardized curriculum, manners that you may have missed in school.
Even if you’ve graduated with honors, you are not yet a master of your field. You lack experience, something that universities can’t adequately give you. Thus, in place of that, your teachers’ sage advice can be your reference for your career decisions.
Find a Mentor among Your Previous Educators
Of course, don’t expect every one of your professors to remain at your back. They still have other students to take care of, of course.
But don’t be dismayed. Just maintaining a student-teacher relationship with one of them can be hugely beneficial. Everybody needs a mentor, and you can still take that mentor-mentee relationship even if you’re done with school already.
Your professor’s experience may help you understand more of where you want to go now. In the future, maybe it will be your story your teacher is going to listen to and learn to.
You may meet other advisors more suitable to your career down the road, but while you’re still starting out, seek good advice where you can, namely, from your teachers.
Sir Isaac Newton once remarked, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” The giants he mentions refer to his predecessors like René Descartes, whose achievements Newton built his work upon.
In your case, your teachers’ knowledge will be the groundwork for your own accomplishments.
Good Luck
Finding jobs, whether it’s for the long haul or for the time being (to pay the bills), is a hurdle on its own. You have to toughen yourself amid the pool of equally talented or far more experienced applicants. Each industry has its quirks, and you may have to pass a drug test to enter one. So do your homework, including getting into the appropriate detox programs.
If you’ve noticed, these tips for “wrapping up” your school life are more about preparing for what’s next. Indeed, your graduation is just an interim period. Pretty soon, you’ll be working for a living. Some people, later on, overwhelmed by all the new responsibilities, wish they were back in school again.
That said, brace yourself for the bumpier and more challenging stages in life. Besides, just because you’ve finished school doesn’t mean your education should stop. A good education is the foundation of your success, but foundations eventually erode, so if you don’t maintain them, your vocation may cave in down a pitfall of obsoletion.
Therefore, keep enriching yourself with new knowledge. Keep your mind sharp and honed. Keep learning, young graduate.
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