Climbing the Corporate Ladder

Graduating from College means having to admit it's time you're entering the "Real World". However, that also comes with a slew of Adult responsibilities - and getting a J.O.B. is one of them. (How else do you ever plan to pay off those student loans?) One in ten people might find a job that will actually turn into a steady paying career gig that they will stick with until retirement (or their mid-life crisis), but for the other nine of us, we are often forced to take whatever jobs we can get in order to pay our bills and rent. Yes, it might not be the best job in the world, but every two weeks you get a paycheck that you can then turn into actual money to use for goods and services, and that's not so bad now, is it?

Some people think they are too good to take certain types of jobs like being an assistant to an assistant of an assistant or what basically amounts to a glorified intern. They seem to think that just because they have a degree (much just like the 10,000 other people sending in resumes to the same postings on Monster.com), that they should be getting that Project Manager or Assistant VP position fresh out of college, and start off making $60,000-$80,000 a year. Hate to break it to you, but you need to pay your dues and put in your time first to get to that top rung. It doesn't happen overnight. You don't just walk into a company and magically get a position at 25 that people who are 45 have been working their asses off their whole adult life to get into.

So now that you've got your paycheck money, you've paid your rent and whatever utilities you feel important (no one really needs hot water, right?), you've got a little extra cash to go out and cavort with other twenty-somethings and collectively bitch about the grunt work you're doing at your low-paying, headache-inducing, straight-outta-college job:

"I tried to go on Facebook and it was blocked!"
"I can't just wear jeans and a t-shirt?"
"My boss wanted me to go get her coffee. There's no Starbucks around - she expected me to actually MAKE it myself!"

Look, you're on the bottom rung of the ladder - deal with it. No one said life was going to be easy. Hey! You should be lucky you even have a job after graduation to begin with. I mean, yeah, everyone needs to chance to vent about things in their life frustrating them - but we all had to start somewhere. Whether it's making copies or fetching coffee, no one becomes a CEO overnight. And bringing that attitude to the office isn't going to make it any better. It will reflect in your work as you sit at your desk, bored, answering phones in a monotone fit for AM radio.

Show some enthusiasm & initiative: Don't just wait to be given work, ask and see what you can do. Once your supervisors and bosses see that you are actively taking an interest in your tasks at hand, perhaps you will be looked at for bigger projects and be given more responsibilities. (Now you can take a 45 minute lunch instead of a 30!) Then you'll get more wiggle room to get away with things like taking personal phone calls or twittering during office hours or coming in late and hung over on a Friday. Remember, this is your first job and it certainly won't be your last. You're going to want to stay on people's good sides in order to get good references and recommendations if and when you decide to leave your current job for something better suited to your needs. (And your checking account) 

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If you haven't found your niche in the Corporate sphere, fret not! Try not to worry too much about the now and focus on the bigger picture: where you see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years. Try to find a job that is at least related to the field that you are interested in and one that will have a lot of room for learning, growth and eventually promotion. If you can get your foot in the door (even if it is sitting behind a phone bank or pushing a mail cart), then that is the first step to eventually getting that Senior VP or Project Manager job. A lot of companies prefer to promote within before hiring from the outside, and if you already know the ropes, then your odds are a lot better than someone they're going to blindly pluck from a pile of resumes.

Your job is what you make of it and one day, your career will make you. Until then, that's what happy hour is for.

When I Grow Up

When you're a kid and Adults ask you what you wanna be when you grow up, it's so easy to have a quick answer: Astronaut, Teacher, Model, Doctor, Lawyer, Basketball Player. But when you finally get to be an Adult, sometimes you find yourself struggling to find the answer to that same question. Now that you're finally "grown up", aren't you supposed to be something already? If you're lucky, you went to College and got a (potentially useful) Bachelor's degree. If you're even luckier, you got a Master's degree too. And if you're like me and you have both, you're trying to figure out what you do with them instead of mounting them on your wall to collect dust.

In Elementary school, I said I wanted to be Veterinarian.

In Middle School, Fashion Designer.

In High School, a Writer.

I always knew I liked to write. My dad encouraged me; He praised stories I showed him and told me I was going to be a great writer one day. (To my Dad, the sun shines out of my ass, so he's gonna love anything I show him.) My mom "encouraged" me by shoving Reader's Digest and other magazine essay contest clip outs at me and told me to submit my work. (Even though she could never pry herself away from the TV long enough to read anything I wrote and/or even give me half-way decent feed back on any of my writing.) I applied to English/Creative Writing programs at 3 schools in Boston. I wasn't interested in going anywhere else and do anything else: I started my senior year dead set on becoming a writer in Boston one day.

Half way through the school year, however, I was taking a Forensic Science course. (And no, I didn't jump on the CSI: bandwagon; CSI: actually just came out that year and my teacher was so excited to be able to incorporate episodes of the show into our lesson plans.) I became really fascinated by Forensics and thought maybe I would like to try and go to College to do all the crime scene investigation stuff too. There were very few colleges offering the program at the time though and my options were between Pace University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But since I'd already applied and been accepted to schools in Boston, I'd have to wait it out. I did eventually transfer after 2 years (to John Jay instead of Pace which I am still kind of mad at my parents over) and it turned out, there was just too much science and math involved for me to succeed in it as I had hoped. Science & Math had never been my strong suits. (They say those that are good at Writing and other Liberal Arts disciplines are usually weak in the other 2 areas, and vice versa.)

So it was back to English for me. I had too many credits to transfer to my new/third/final college's Creative Writing program (now even more pissed, Mom and Dad!) so I completed my studies as a Literature major. Great. A Bachelor of Arts in Literature. There's something thats sure to put a roof over my head one day! Well, that degree combined with the amazing internship at my first college's (which I chose because of their superb Co-op education program that was supposed to help people find internships in their fields) Registrar's Office, helped me land a job in..... another Registrar's Office! And that was useful enough to help me get my Masters degree for free. So now I had a Master of Science in... Communication Arts?... which consisted of some Communications, Marketing, PR and Advertising courses - but certainly not enough experience to go out and get a job in any of those fields. I suppose I could have just tried to fake it until I made it, but with the economy in the Shitter and the fact that most Marketing jobs either wanted 5+ years of experience or straight Interns, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Which brings me to where I am now: Working in my third Registrar's Office, a safety net in an economy where jobs are harder to get than Crocodile Birkin bags, with absolutely no solid plans for my future. I had tossed out all kinds of potential possibilities for myself: Get some kind of marketing job that allows for great advancement and a six figure paycheck, become a Celebrity publicist (Lindsay Lohan, when you get out of jail, call me!), start a blog that's going to make me rich and famous (hint hint!), write a Great American Chick Lit Novel, earn an MA in TESOL and go teach English overseas, go back to school and get a PhD in Social Psychology where I research the behavioral patterns of Boys & Men and one day write a book to help Women figure out the male species once and for all and hence, make lots of money.

What I actually am doing: Sitting in my pajamas on a Monday night writing a blog post about how I don't know what I want to do, where I want to go, who I want to be, or what the fuck I'm doing with my life,.

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In the infamous words of Meredith Grey, "We're Adults - When did that happen? And how do we make it stop?"