My last class of my undergrad experience was an art history class taught in Spanish. My professor, who only spoke English when a student was utterly confused, paused at the end of his lecture. He looked up to the row of students tuned out on their laptops and said, “That’s it.”

That’s it! My college experience was over. He turned on the lights, closed his computer, and we all walked out of the library basement classroom.

I absolutely love school. I love the excitement on the first days of school. I love making class friends with the people who sit next to me. I love challenging myself. I love the schedule, the busy days, the people-watching in the library, being surrounded by people my own age.

So, you can imagine my devastation when it dawned on me that everything I had ever known and loved was OVER! (Okay that’s dramatic but you get the point). 

I just graduated from NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. I titled my concentration “The (De)Construction of Identity in Everyday Life and Popular Culture,” but don’t tell anyone because I’m planning on changing the title of it for every job interview. If someone cares enough to ask a follow-up question, I’ll usually start listing all the subjects I covered: gender studies, popular cultural studies, multi-media art, social impact, philosophy, phenomenology, perception, time, experience, truth. It keeps going. 

Throughout my time at NYU, I would freak out about what I was going to do after college. What does one do with a gender studies major? Nothing!, according to the Internet. It turns out, there’s a lot of stuff you can do with it, which doesn’t help someone who chose a broad major where she didn’t have to commit to any one discipline, because she’s now faced with the same decision, only this time there’s a little more urgency!

As graduation loomed, I became concerned with the fact that instead of learning tangible skills for a tangible job like many of my peers. I spent my time reading dense theory, learning new mediums of art, and writing essays on the cultural impact of celebrities. 

Oh wait, I realized, those are all sort of useful skills! I was learning to see the world, to analyze the world, to understand my place in it. I learned to read and write and criticize and communicate, all great skills for literally any career! Even as I wrote out everything I learned from each of those disciplines for this blog post (not included but maybe I’ll share another time if anyone cares), I saw just how much I learned. Soft skills, curiosities, and questions that I now greatly value! 

My dilemma still stands: what do I do with the rest of my life? 

Long story short, I spoke with some grown ups and found myself starting in public relations, a nice interdisciplinary career where I still don’t have to commit to one area of interest. Since graduation, I’ve now been an intern at two different companies, working across consumer, healthcare, business, and tech accounts and learning lots. I’ve gotten a taste of creative strategy and analytics as well as more traditional PR. 

I should probably save my observations about corporate life when I’ve been in it a little longer. My first impressions are, though, that it’s both not what I expected and everything that I expected. It’s definitely different from school. There are even tighter deadlines, less room to mull things over and sit with ideas. Less room for play, even though the tasks themselves can be playful and creative. 

As I’m digesting all this new information and figuring out where I fit into the corporate world, I’m trying to figure out a way to incorporate all that I’ve learned in school. At Gallatin, I got to study exactly what I wanted, and skip the subjects I didn’t. Not to toot my own horn, but I probably skipped class less than 10 times all of college, and if I didn’t have time to complete a reading, I would go back after class and read it because I was so interested in it. 

Work is different though. While my attendance record proves helpful for a 9-5 job, I cannot just avoid the things I don’t want to do! Instead, I’m forcing myself to use maybe the most valuable skill I learned in my interdisciplinary program: how to make even the most seemingly irrelevant stuff somehow useful and interesting to me. If anyone has any tips on how to make AI and tech innovation related to my interests, please let me know! 

Sitting at a desk all day (or my bed, working from home) is an adjustment. So is having less time to see my friends, and endless screentime, and morning commutes with all the suits on the train. There’s also things to like though, or at least attempt to glamorize: a new work-appropriate wardrobe with endless supplies of ballet flats, new work friends, picking out my emojis on Teams, and laughing at corporate lingo. Nothing is forever!

I’m trying to cut myself some slack for this massive life change where suddenly my entire purpose has changed, but I’m also using this discomfort as a sign to pursue what I do like and integrate what I know feels good into the next steps of my career and life (grad school here I come?!?!)

Because, that’s not IT! What I loved about life on May 15th (graduation) can still be the same stuff as May 16th, and every day after that. It just takes a little bit more work, and I am excited for the challenges of the new scary big world.

---

Welcome to my blog! I have several half written blog posts but I had to rip the bandaid off and post something. So here you go, and talk to you soon! ❤