Look Mom, I Graduated! Now What? Revisited

About a month ago I came across a tweet from @jenny8lee on twitter looking to write about recent grads dealing with the challenges of today's economy by reinventing themselves and creating careers (I'm paraphrasing as this was about a month ago which in the Twitterverse is like an era). I asked my smart, well educated, entrepreneurial daughter to reach out to her. She shared her email with me, and it struck me how much it said in a couple of paragraphs. So, with her permission I'm posting it here.


Hi Jenny,

My mother, a follower of yours on Twitter (@SCJoson), actually put me on to this (insert unprofessional "lol" here). She informed me that you were looking to interview recent college graduates in "situations" and I, among thousands of others, can definitely identify with that! I'm a 2008 graduate from Douglass College-Rutgers University, with 2 bachelors in Economics and Latin American Studies; I interned and part-timed for 2 years at a global investment bank while going to school, as well.

The verdict? I have a beautiful piece of paper that says I'm smart, another piece of paper that says I have experience, and a monthly notice (more paper) that arrives to remind me how much I owe the government for helping me obtain the first two. Interviewing, and schmoozing (I believe we call this networking now) got me a lot of nothing, so after about a year of that, I moved on. I have my own blog since 2010 and have been working independently for the last 3 years in that Latin Urban music industry doing everything from web design and public relations to promotions and producing (insert "etc." here). Until recently, I was working at Starbucks serving all those who have the jobs I studied 4 years for, alongside aspiring actors and dancers of course. Don't get me wrong, Starbucks is a great enterprise and I loved my co-workers, but I gladly took that "dead-end" job to have some sort of medical insurance, a steady income and free espresso.

Perhaps my case sounds interesting enough to explore, and even if it's not, I'm still really glad you're concerned enough with the issue to seek out candidates to dissect.

Maybe it's really not us, it's them.

My daughter has always been an entrepreneur. From the time she was in middle school she was making things and selling them, or doing people's hair (see my earlier post about proms). She has been able to get by in this economy while her fellow Economics grads were taking jobs as bank tellers (still honest work, but a slap in the face after four years at a university), or worse finding no jobs at all. She started a business, but not every young person has the gumption or ability to do that. So for this young generation pouring out of our universities each year: Now What?

The original 2009 Look Mom, I Graduated! Now What?

Women's History Month: Remembering My Mother

In honor of Women's History Month, I'm published this tribute to my mother that I wrote to read at her memorial service four years ago.

When I close my eyes and think of my mother, I remember her young, and pretty in a short dress. I remember that I wanted to be just like her. She was stubborn (mostly in a good way) and adventurous and lived out loud. When she was a young girl, she was called Perk, short for Percolator. Her Aunt Rae called her that, and it stuck. The name suited her because it described how lively and talkative she was.

I guess we all have snapshots in our mind of when we were little, and I have mine. I remember the two of us sleeping side by side in the twin beds in her childhood room at Oak Terrace. The night the Laurel in the Pines burnt down, sirens from every town for miles around blared all night. I was terrified of sirens. She reached across the aisle between the beds and held my hand until I feel asleep. I remember her reading me Peter Pan cuddled in her bed on David Drive in Beach Haven West. I remember her pretending to be mad at Peter the morning we came back soaked after he snuck me out for an early morning boat ride while she was still asleep.

My mother was the much younger second child of working parents. Her older brother went away to college when she was 7. While she was probably the world’s worst eater, and in fact survived much of her childhood on mustard sandwiches, she took great joy in writing her big brother to regale him with the list of delicacies being prepared by the housekeeper while he was eating college fare.

When she went away to Bryn Mawr, she told my grandmother she wanted to study business so she could help run the family’s department store. My grandmother, who was quite a trailblaizer in her time as a woman who was a partner in running a large business, told her NO you need to major in something NICE. So, she majored in history. She loved Bryn Mawr. She took us back with her many times through the colorful stories she told of her years there. It was a wonderful and exciting place for a very bright young woman from a small town on the Jersey shore. I read a passage on the Bryn Mawr website that gives an uncanny explanation of why she belonged at there. It reads: “Who went to Bryn Mawr? Women whose commitment to excellence and integrity distinguishes them in every field: women who have broken down barriers, expanded scientific knowledge, captivated audiences, enthralled readers, shaped national and international policy, advocated for the powerless, founded corporations around the world.” In short, women just like her. But to here her tell it, it wasn’t all so serious and noble. There were good times, and good friends. Many of whom she stayed in touch with for the rest of here life. Those were changing times. Imagine that those same young women who protested at Woolworth’s because of their refusal to integrate their lunch counter, were still required by Bryn Mawr rules to wear skirts to dinner in Merion Hall. So I guess you could change the world, as long as you did it in a skirt. Actually, one of the clearest images I have from the Bryn Mawr stories my mother told, was of the girls keeping a skirt hanging on the back of their door that they pulled on to go down to dinner.

After my mother graduated from Bryn Mawr, she traveled around Europe extensively. Living there for several years. She had an incredible ability to learn languages. She spoke French, and learned to speak German by ear. This was the precursor to a lifelong career teaching English as a second language to both children and adults. We used to joke that both of us would take on the accent of whomever we spoke to. She told me my grandfather did the same thing. Now, I see my own son and daughter do it. I guess it’s like she always said, “the apple never falls far from the tree.”

My mother was a wide and avid reader, and her reading list could trump Oprah any day. She and I passed books back and forth regularly. We read fiction and non-fiction. Together we probably cornered the market on books about the holocaust. Then we went on an unending streak about women in China. I’m reading a great book right now, and my first thought upon starting it was “I’ll have to give this to Mom when I finish it”.

When my mother discovered email in the nineties, she took to it like a fish to water. She used it to keep her children close to her. Even though we were in various parts of the world, she kept up with our lives via email. But her email wasn’t just little notes about what happened on a given day. She’d send articles, and we’d discuss them. We’d talk about politics. She adopted email as yet another tool in her quest against political wrongs and injustice. I have the terrible habit of never cleaning out my inbox. Perhaps, not so terrible in this case, because I kept so many of her emails. Here are some excerpts:

October 19, 2004
I’d read the article you mention and thought of Gigi. The most effective thing we can do now is VOTE. I hope Juli has registered. I can’t think of any election in my lifetime that has mattered so much. Did you read the New York Times Sunday magazine cover story on Bush by Ron Suskind? It was so frightening. M

July 1, 2005
“Once, when I was active in the Soviet Jewry movement, I phoned the chief prosecutor in Moscow and got through I might add. The then chairwoman was afraid to make the call for fear she’d get on their list and when they came they’d get her. I, on the other hand, had no fears at all. I said, if they come, it’ll already be too late. You gotta stop these people where they live, not where you live. Have we learned nothing? The idea in flooding the chief prosecutor with calls was in letting him know we were watching a particular trial and he wasn’t going to get away with it. By we, I mean the thousands of me calling in at the same time. Also on my call list that day was the Soviet Ambassador to the UN and the on to DC. We see where all that ended…”

October 22, 2004
“Ever wonder what it would’ve been like to have Gore as President? We’d either still have our surplus or at least, social security would’ve been fixed, maybe health benefits extended. We wouldn’t have gone to Iraq, we wouldn’t have a huge deficit. We wouldn’t have weakened protections for air and water. There would be press conferences we’d find boring. There’d be separation of church and state. I would view the possibility of a foreign vacation positively, maybe even France. I feel he’s the Grinch who stole my country.”

It wasn’t all politics. Sometimes it was just a few special words to let us know she loved us.

December 6, 2004
Happy Birthday!!! If you take a cutting from a forsythia in your yard today and put it in water in the house, you’ll have blooms for Christmas (an old German gardener’s custom).

If you take a look out your window today, you’ll see that the forsythia is blooming. My mother had already noticed…

Super Irrational at the Supermarket - Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely highlights our irrationality at the supermarket in this brief, but interesting video. Why do we think bigger is always a better deal, even if it isn't? Would love to see him take a trip to one of the warehouse stores where, in my opinion, irrationality abounds. I look forward to Ariely's full article in the July-August HBR.

Recommended Reading: She Got Out of Debt, So It's Time to Party

This is a great "feel good" article from TwinCities.com about one new grad who took a good, hard look at her finances and cleaned up her act.

She Got Out of Debt, So It's Time to Party

"One twentysomething saw a shaky economy and a worrisome credit card balance. But she didn't fret; she set out to pay it off. Now, she embraces living within her means." Read more...

Look Mom, I Graduated! Now What?

The Class of 2009 is graduating into one of the worst job markets in decades. Lot's of articles are being written on the subject. What are the job prospects for these new graduates? If they have the means, many will go straight to grad school. Others will look in fields they otherwise might not have considered, like education. That could be a good thing. The bottom line is, they'll have to get on with their lives and do something. It's a bitter pill to swallow after years of hard work, but sometimes life doesn't work out exactly the way you planned. My husband likes to say that life is like a wheel, sometimes you're on the top and sometimes you're on the bottom. It's tough coming out of school into this market, but maybe learning to overcome adversity and pull through isn't such bad training for the road ahead. Just keep your eyes on the road.

I graduated into the recession of the early 80’s. I had a ream of rejection letters from every bank and Wall Street firm out there (most of which no longer exist, like Manufacturers Hanover and Chemical Bank, as a result of 20 years of consolidation). I got by tending bar and waiting tables. Ultimately, I went on to get my first job in my field, and my career got rolling. In tough times like these, take whatever job you need to in order to get by, but here's my 20-20 hindsight advice about what to do while you're treading water:

• Plug into networking opportunities in your industry (these 3 are great for women in financial services The Women's Bond Club , 85 Broads and The Financial Women's Association).
• Go to industry events to learn about what’s going on in your desired field as well as make connections.
• Do volunteer work, it’s also a great way to network while doing something productive.
• Read, read, read. Newspapers, magazines, the latest business books, all of these keep you abreast of the latest trends, what's happening in the economy, what the "new new thing is". I highly recommend Outliers and The Tipping Point, both by Malcolm Gladwell. Also, Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson.
  
• Lastly, tap your school’s alumni network to the fullest extent. Those of us who’ve been there and done that, love to help young grads.

What do you think? Please post your comments.

Recommended Reading: The Marketplace of Perceptions

I've written a lot about deferred gratification, and trade offs, and also about the importance of reading the fine print when making decisions. I recently came across this April 2006 cover article in Harvard Magazine by Craig Lambert discussing how we make economic choices, and the external forces that shape those decisions. It's fascinating reading. What do you think?

"Behavioral economics explains why we procrastinate, buy, borrow, and grab chocolate on the spur of the moment" Read more...

Dollars are Made Out of Pennies

I've talked a lot in previous posts about setting priorities, and teaching our children to set priorities or defer gratification. How does that translate into dollars and cents in every day life? How do you get a child (or even many adults) to grasp that skipping a Starbucks Frappuccino or a Snapple can pay for a PS3 game? Sometimes things are easier to understand if you break them into pieces. A big project seems undo-able until you break it down into tasks and milestones. The same is true about prioritizing and saving for an expenditure.

Let's start at the beginning. Dollars are made out of pennies. This is at the core of how money works, but to many it's intangible, especially if they usually pay with invisible money. How does saving 25 cents now translate into that $50 game later? The answer, of course, is to save a quarter here and a dollar there until, over time, you have the $50. Now we're starting to talk about math a child can understand. So, the Frappuccino vs. PS3 game choice isn't a one time trade off, it's a many times trade off. How many times? If the Frappuccino costs about $4, and the game costs about $50 then the answer is more than 10 times. That may sound like a lot of times, but it doesn't have to be the only trade off. More trade offs gets you to $50 faster. I know, this isn't rocket science. Still, I'm always surprised to learn how many people don't get it.

I once read a column in the Wall Street Journal where the author talked about playing "the soda game" with his kids. It's a great idea. Here's how it works. You're at a restaurant. You give your kids a choice: they can order soda or you'll give them whatever the soda costs. Suddenly that $3.00 investment in soda is theirs instead of yours. Most kids (but not all) will happily take the cash in hand. A good lesson, but doesn't work for everyone because there's still the element of "other people's money".

Here's a story my father told me when I was a kid that really makes the point about trade offs and deferred gratification. When he was a little boy, his Aunt and Uncle owned a Five and Dime Store a few towns away. His uncle told his Aunt that she could keep all the change in the drawer at the end of each day for whatever she wanted to buy. She saved the change, and bought a house. Like I said, dollars are made out of pennies.

Do you have examples of trade offs you make? I'd love to hear them.