Maybe you’ve finally gotten that job you’re going for, like I have. Maybe you’re ready to put your job hunting days behind you, like I am. Conceptually, everything you’re looking for to stabilize your postgraduate life has been given to you. The question is, are you ready for it? Here are a couple things I’ve learned in my transition process:

1. It ain’t no cakewalk. We are creatures of habit and the habits that you’ve picked up as an unemployed postgrad should probably stay specific to that period in your life. I know that as much as I tried to stay disciplined, keeping up a high-level of productivity and positivity was definitely the hardest battle for me. It was just so easy to wake up late just because I could, shower only when I had to, eat at odd hours and so forth. This lifestyle won’t cut it once you’re employed because you’ve gotta tighten up your responsibilities, make an effort to stay hygienic and just live a life with some semblance of regularity and normalcy.

2. Be mindful of your spending. So you have an income now. You’ve got the money flowing in and can now justify letting yourself loosen up a little and let some of that money flow out. The economic downturn of yesteryear led to a culture of penny-pinching and watchful spending that I had never experienced before in my lifetime. And now, even before I’ve gotten a penny of my first paycheck, I’ve already gone and spent a large portion of it. In justification, I did have to upgrade my wardrobe a tad to match the corporate vibe of my new workplace but honestly, none of what I bought was absolutely necessary. If there is anything to be learned from the bad economy, it’s that nothing is for sure so if you want to ensure your survivability, you need to incorporate a healthy amount of saving into your life.

I can’t really expand much more on this topic because I’ve only been employed for a two-week block and it’s only been part-time so I’m sure more will come just with experience. What other changes have you guys made to adjust yourself to employed life?

If you’re like me, you had a pretty heavy week last week. Sometimes bad things just happen in bunches and there’s really nothing you can really do about it. First and foremost, the Haitian earthquake happened. That was and still is truly terrible. A tragedy of the worst kind, but like a lot of tragedies that occur overseas in poverty-stricken nations, we can disassociate ourselves from the actual event to lessen the impact that something of that magnitude would have on changing the way we live. We can text in our $5.00 donation, maybe even do it a couple times, and feel that we’ve done our part in helping the recovery process of a broken nation.

Other times, tragedy slaps you upside the head and forces a change. On Saturday morning, I got a text message from one of my good friends saying that his cousin, Justin, died in a car accident the night before. I tried to shake the sleep from my eyes, maybe even pinched myself a couple times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Justin was a member of our church. I watched him grow up but because he went away for school and found a job farther away, we really hadn’t been hanging out that much anymore. Every time he came back home, though, I made sure to at least invite him to hang out.

I spent the greater part of that morning trying to find an actual news clip of the event. I wasn’t gonna believe it until I got some actual proof. It was too tragic an event, too random of an occurrence. He’s winning our fantasy basketball league, for crying out loud. He just made a trade that went through a day ago. He can’t really be gone. I just expected him to walk into our lives and make everything right again.

And yet, that’s not the case. Reality set in for me when I saw his screen name online, signed into his Google chat account. I quickly IMed, not sure what to expect. It was one of the most hopeful yet devastating moments I can remember. Much worse than professing your love to some girl via IM and anticipating her response. This time, the response would determine whether or not a good friend of mine is really gone from this world, moving on to the next. And fate would have it that his brother was checking his account for him. At this point, the surreal became the real.

It’s funny how it takes a tragic event to help you get a healthy understanding of what matters in life. In hindsight, I could have done so much more to show Justin how much I appreciate him. Justin was very driven. He poured himself into school and engineering, and secured for himself a nice job working for a military contractor about a month ago. Things were looking up for him and he was maturing so much. Yet, in his passing, we don’t associate him with his schooling and career. We do remember his hard work ethic and his passion for everything he pursued. We remember the relationships he’s built, the convictions he stood by and the impact he had. We remember his faithfulness, zeal and even his quirks.

Let’s not overlook what really matters in our own lives. Sometimes we get so caught up in living for achievement and success that we forget to cultivate the relationships we want to share life with.

So Cal is weeping for you, Justin Chang. We’ll see you on the other side. 9.26.86 – 1.15.10.

Dear Postgrad,

I know the difficulties that surround your life. The elusive future is always set before you, and the goals and ambitions you once held so dear are constantly shifting to adjust for the realities of your circumstance. It is a difficult position to be in; youthful naiveté collides full on with bitter reality, and the resultant outcome is an unmotivated, undetermined, uninspired version of you. It’s hard to be gung-ho when the cloudiness of what’s in front of you obscures your destination.

So you drift haphazardly along, feeling the weight of pressure constantly mounting on your shoulders. There are nights that you sit at home, and think for endless hours about your situation. Not many of us are exempt from this. Whether you are working or not, the thoughts are still there. Plaguing. Questioning. Is this what I thought my life would be? Can I really see myself doing this for the rest of my life? What do I want to do? Why am I here? How can I gain significance in a hostile and competitive world?

You’ve never felt so little, so unimportant. You feel the tinge of depression; college was so much more exciting. You had freedom in college. You had a “defined” goal, in college. As a matter of fact, your entire life, up until this point, has always been defined. Get through Elementary. Get through Junior High School. Get through High School with a 4.0 GPA, great SAT scores, and 20 completed AP tests. Graduate college, and then…

The question is left unanswered. There is nothing definite, anymore. Grad school? Work? Teach? Play? You have to make your own decisions, now. There’s no one there to walk you hand in hand, anymore. And that void is tough to fill, to negotiate. It used to be as easy as making an appointment with the school counselor. Now, for a little direction, you have to take the initiative and seek out your own counsel.

To you I say one thing: keep on walking, there is significance ahead. Don’t lose sight of your hopes and dreams; tomorrow is another day. If you trudge along, and keep your head up, there will be moments in your life where things begin to come together. There will be days when the “lightbulb” clicks, and things begin to make sense.  During those times, the journey of life begins to work out in your favor, and all the tangles and knots begin to unravel themselves.

Friends come into your life, and speak truth. You pray; an exercise, that perhaps you haven’t practiced since high school, when your parents forced you to go to church (or your friends convinced you that you should attend their high school retreat). But this time, the prayer doesn’t go unanswered. This time, there’s a response. A glimmer of hope.

And slowly but surely, you climb out of the uncertainty. One step at a time, you get through the loneliness, the fear of failure, the (insert difficulty here). Your life begins to have purpose again.

Keep on walking. Keep on moving. Don’t lose faith, don’t let jadedness or bitterness consume you. There’s hope, there’s joy, there’s happiness to be found in spite of it all. And if all else fails? Buy a motorcycle.

It’s easy to get caught up doing our own postgraduate “thing”. The drive for success, for career, for love, for pleasure and for personal security is something we all share but sometimes, events occur that are so sobering that we have to lay aside our own agendas to make the biggest difference we can.

On January 12, 2010, Haiti experienced hell on earth. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck off the coast and the ensuing destruction is so tragic that the quake has been called the worst in the area in the last 200 years. It directly affected the densely populated Haitian capital Port-au-Prince (about 1.8 million people) and early estimates have said that 50,000 people have died but reality may prove to be much worse.

We here at The Postgrad value your support. Those of you who have helped us by reading faithfully and clicking on our sponsored links from time to time have helped us acquire the resources we need to keep the site up and running. You guys have done a lot – more than enough to get the job done. We were going to use the surplus to give a little back by holding giveaways – ipods, itunes gift cards, whatever.

Now our plans seems so petty when placed in this context. So we’re going to pledge all of the money we’ve earned to help the Haitian earthquake relief efforts. It isn’t much but any little bit helps at this point. We hope you don’t mind. We’re proud to be able to help preserve human life and help rebuild a broken country. We sincerely hope you can join us in this effort. There’s no marketing gimmick here. Let’s do the humane thing.

The Big Picture – Earthquake in Haiti

Haiti Earthquake Relief – How You Can Help

The trap of laziness looms menacingly over all, and any of us could fall victim to it’s enticing ways. And the reality is that laziness is indeed an attractive vice. This is because being inactive (as much as we internally hate it) gives us an opportunity to shut out all the stress and anxiety that surrounds the normal life. I for one am a professional procrastinator. But the older I get, and the more responsibilities I have piled on top of me, the more and more I realize that I cannot be wasteful with my time. This is my simple guide to help people stay on top of their busy schedules (or at least try to!).

1. Don’t put off emails. Look guys. We live in a tech age, and the importance of email has been steadily increasing since its advent. Email is no longer optional but mandatory. Within that same wavelength, an important discipline to begin to develop (that will save you a lot of time in the long run) is to respond to emails that won’t take that much time immediately. Most emails you get nowadays will probably only take you less than 1-2 minutes to respond to. And yet, it’s incredible how many of us put a “star” next to the email and put it off to respond to later. The only problem with this strategy is that you end up with fifty starred emails, some of them being 2-3 weeks old and already expired. Not only have you created more work for yourself, but you’ve probably frustrated some one (whether it’s a friend or employer) due to your lack of urgency.
2. Budget your time. I know this is not really appealing to do. No one likes the idea of being restricted, or pigeonholed into a certain daily existence. But at the same time, there is something very advantageous about being conscious of how you spend your time. Set aside specific amount of hours for things that you enjoy (like Facebook’s recently trending Farmville) but make sure that you also get your work done! This is especially important if you’re unemployed or self employed. When you have to make your own decision about how to spend your time, and someone else isn’t doing it for you a la 9-5, it’s really tough sometimes to use your time wisely. You have 16 hours in a day, unless of course you sleep like a monster (another time management issue!). Use the weekdays productively, and if you want, go crazy on the weekends.
3. Create a to do list. Then do it. It’s funny to me how many people I know that create to do lists every week (religiously) and then don’t do anything on it. Basically, you’ve essentially wasting the 15-30 minutes it takes to actually prepare the list! It’s important for people with a busy schedule to have some way to manage the workflow that is required of them. Even those with impeccable memory, unless you have photographic, will eventually be cluttered with so much work junk that you will forget something. Don’t fall into this trap: create a to do list and then do it!
4. Utilize the bathroom. I’ve literally finished an entire book while taking care of my business in the bathroom. I mean, of course this didn’t happen in the course of one trip (oh my goodness that would be disgusting). But over the course of a month, I’ve finished a small book that I’ve always wanted to read while on the toilet. My philosophy is, if you’re going to be in there anyways… Honestly, that 10-15 minutes if used properly can be used toward some productive end (besides the obvious immediate productive necessity!).

These are just a few simple ways to begin living a more productive lifestyle. Look, the bottom line is, everyone desires to be productive to some end. Productivity in and of itself is rewarding because you release the stress and anxiety you normally get when you are unproductive! Instead of wasting time, let’s use our time meaningfully. We only have one life to live. Do something with it!

We’ve mentioned this on the site before; things slow to a crawl when you graduate from college. Maybe your metabolism, maybe your sociability, maybe even your love life. One thing seems to go for sure, though – your discipline to stay fit. I know that happened to me. I’m a generally fit person. I’ve always been conscious of my diet and exercise routine, but when you have your whole life to live before you and maybe nobody to impress, exercise just doesn’t take precedence. But here’s to the new year and maybe, if you’re like me, a set of new resolutions. Judging by the post-holiday population increase at the gym, getting fit is one of the biggies. So how can you get there?

1. Set a realistic goal. Keep it simple and obtainable. Lose 10 pounds. Lose 2 inches in the waist. Be able to run a mile in under 8 minutes. It’s hard to find the discipline if there’s no feasible goal in sight. I know it took a clear goal for me to hit the gym the last couple of weeks. After a heartbreaking loss at a football game, I vowed to work harder and get stronger so that in the rematch (coming up in 2 weeks), I wouldn’t be so helpless. And it has really helped. I’ve been much more disciplined in the past couple of weeks and can already see great results.

2. Realize that it takes work. Nothing comes easy, especially in regards to physical fitness. Professional athletes capable of amazing physical feats wouldn’t be able to compete very well if they weren’t disciplined in their training. A lot of the time, their success during the regular season directly correlates with the amount of work they put in during the off season. Sure, you can get by on natural talent to a certain degree, but if you want actual results, you need to put in the work. So consider your realistic goal from number 1, research it and figure out the best way to break it down to bite-sized pieces, and figure out what quality ‘work’ you can do to get to that goal.

3. Gather your resources. There is no clearcut way to stay fit. If you’re not able to go to the gym solo, then go with a dedicated group of friends. If you can’t run by yourself, take your dog out for a brisk run. A way that has helped me personally has been my iPhone. Yes, there’s an app for that. It’s called iFitness and it’s probably one of my most useful apps right now. There are pictures and videos that teach you how to execute certain exercises at the gym. You can build your own workout to help you focus on different muscle groups or accomplish certain goals. The best part, by far, is that you can log every exercise you do. As I go from workout to workout, electronically logging every exercise I do, I can clearly evaluate my progress over a given time period. When you feel like you’re actually accomplishing something, then the goal that you’ve set isn’t something unattainable. Because you feel capable, you’ll find that staying fit isn’t so much an impossibility but just a matter of willpower.

What are some of your personal goals this year?

And we’re back! We were off and busy for the holidays, but after a couple weeks of inactivity, we’re back in action. Thank you for your support up until now!

One important conflict that many post-grads face is the idea of settling. This concept can be applicable to more than one stream of thought, but the dilemma exists primarily in two categories: one’s future spouse and one’s personal career.

Our generation, which has been called “Generation Y”, is epitomized by a culture that disdains the idea of settling. To settle is almost worse than death itself. To many of us, settling implies that we failed. That we didn’t achieve the goal that we originally set forth to achieve. It’s hard to refute this point: to a certain extent, when we settle, the very idea of settling does suggest that we didn’t achieve everything we had originally set off to achieve.

Furthermore, the truth is most of us don’t really feel the urgency to settle. And with good reason! Nowadays, if worst comes to worst, we can just live at home while we scour the job market for our “dream” career. Marriage? Same difference. The aforementioned “live at home until thirty syndrome” has genuinely swept across the United States. Statistically speaking, roughly 60% (according to Monster.com) of college students move back home after graduating.

This is a staggering statistic, but it speaks volumes as to why our generation has such an aversion to settling. We just don’t care. We’re perfectly content to live off the wealth of our parents, to enjoy the life of being single, and to navigate the real world with little more than our ambition and desire to be the best that we can be.

And to be honest, the more I think about it, the more I realize why should we settle? I mean, truth be told, I do believe that we should definitely temper our ideals if they are far too unrealistic. Being too idealistic about what we want can also be a path to inevitable failure. I’m not going to make it to the NBA at this point in my life, let’s be real. But at the same time, having been given a certain freedom to test the waters of both our romantic and career lives, let’s be young and make some mistakes! I am a firm believer in taking risks in life. Life was meant to be enjoyed; let’s enjoy it!

While we balance the real world with the world of our ideals, let’s be careful to not live in the clouds, but at the same time, continue to pursue excellence and the best that we can possibly achieve. If you have your eyes set on a particular job, pursue it passionately. Even if in the end you have to change your goals to accommodate reality, don’t start off that way. Who knows? What if you end up getting that perfect job? Or that perfect wife/husband? Or that perfect…?

Of course, this principle is only really applicable until we reach the apocalyptic ages of thirty. Things tend to quickly unravel at that point, and our ideals come crashing down from their pedestals, and join the ranks of the real world. Eharmony.com and Match.com becomes a real option. You’ll take basically any job that you can get.

But hey. I’m not thirty quite yet. And if you’ve just graduated college, neither are you. Live a little. You only get to live this part of your life once.

We all enjoy the holidays. It’s a great time to get together with family and friends you don’t see very often. You get to enjoy good food together, watch holiday movies, catch-up, go snowboarding/skiing and best of all, take a necessary break from your hectic work or school life. I remember as a child, I lived for the breaks. The mere idea that a break was coming got me through most of my school life. This comes with a price-tag, though, cause holidays can be a very expensive experience. Gifts, even small ones, will add up quickly. Snowboard trips including gear, clothes, lift tickets, accommodations and food will leave a pretty sizable dent in your savings. There was one Christmas that my brother and I took to the local mall to get gifts for our close friends. We swept through the mall, quickly found gifts we figured to be perfect for our friends, then busted out our credit cards and swiped-swiped-swiped. By the next pay cycle, we realized what a hole we dug ourselves in; unfortunately, it would be years before we would shed our spendthrift ways. Here are some good ways to enjoy your holidays and still stay afloat financially:

1. Prioritize your gift giving. There’s a famous twitter user that made this relevant tweet last week: “Everybody’s broke, so here’s the rule for Christmas this year; if you still &$#@ your pants, you get a present. Otherwise, tough &$#@.” Crude as that sounds, I found wisdom in it. A lot of us aren’t at a place to be dishing out gifts left and right even though that might feel good. Consider who makes the cut. Significant others, parents and children make it. Everyone else needs to get in line. Making your bills and paying your mortgage takes precedence over you being a pseudo-Santa Claus. I’m sure everyone else will understand because they’re probably in the same boat.

2. Embrace Secret Santa. If you must give gifts to your friends, then embrace the Secret Santa. Secret Santa works like this. You get together your group of friends (office buddies, bowling buddies, church group, fraternity etc.), write down everyone’s name on a slip of paper and everyone pulls a name one by one. You become the Secret Santa for that one person. You just have to get one decent gift for that one person. If you don’t know that person that well, you can use this as an opportunity to investigate them. Learn their likes and dislikes. Send spies to find out what they might want. At the Christmas party, everyone opens up their gifts and tries to guess who their Secret Santa was. It’s a fun way to spice up the Christmas gift giving experience and the best part about it is that you only have to buy ONE gift. Yes, it may feel a bit impersonal, but in these tough economic times, you’ve gotta do what you gotta do. See it this way; you’re giving one gift but you’re helping everyone else out by giving them (and yourself) the gift of financial responsibility! Try Elfster, an online gift exchange service; it’s great, especially the part where you get to ask anonymous questions!

3. Be creative. If you’re artsy, make gifts for your friends and save yourself a bundle of cash. If you plan on going snowboarding, forgo that cushy cabin experience and max out the square feet of a cheap motel with your friends. Bring instant noodles to slurp down between runs. Powdered hot cocoa and canned soup are a much cheaper alternative to the prices for cocoa and soup you’ll get in an isolated ski lodge. If you’re looking to just get a winter snow experience (quite a trek for us Californians), then jump in a car for a day trip with your friends. Grab a sled, hike up the mountain and you’ll be having yourself a ball in no time. The point is that there’s always a different means to an end. Learn to enjoy the holidays for the experiences you’ll get from the quality time you get to spend with close friends and family, not for the gifts that you may or may not be able to give one another this year!