graduation

THE WEEK AFTER

It’s been 10 days since I graduated Grand Valley State University with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. Where I thought the preceding week would feel like a triumph, it’s felt more like the fallout of a relationship. I’ve been walking around in a stupor, going through a mental checklist that no longer exists. What’s the next upcoming class? The next test? There’s nothing there—just a void of who I used to be just a fortnight ago. Being in college has defined my life for the past 18 months. And now…nothing.

I’m not longer ‘Robert Hyma-in-pursuit-of-his-BA.’

Today, I’m ‘Robert Hyma-Ok-I-have-my-BA-now-what?’

The plan was to immediately transition into a tenacious job-hunt the day after graduation, which has happened. I’ve compiled a newly printed resumé, updated LinkedIn, and have set up profiles on Indeed and ZipRecruitor (as well as GVSU’s Handshake networking system) to begin the journey to finding a career.

The problem, as some of you are spotting immediately, is that this process is coming a tad late in the game. Most of my classmates have filled their summer schedules with unpaid internships (modern day indentured servitude—but with a maybe/sorta reward of a resumé bullet point afterwards). Maybe I resisted this path because I’ve had a sorta/kinda career path before resuming college, but I assumed a degree would grant instant entry into the jobs I was not qualified for previously. I just needed a piece of university stationary that said I was now qualified for a more enticing career.

Right?

Yes and no. The path to any career is mysterious, often defined by a mixture of the type of person, the era, the culture, and valued skillset. Still, stupid is stupid, and I may have made life more tedious than it needed to be by focusing on my studies so intensely.

The real trick of college is to have one foot in and out the door: Excelling in coursework while simultaneously leveraging this achievement into the working world.

And it all sounds like a great plan until reality sets in—college students are merely human beings. I’ve often been amazed by my classmates who have worked menially paying part-time jobs, coming into young adulthood and confronting identity with new groups of people, how to date and find love (if at all), combatting a hyper-aware society forever wired into the age of the internet, prone to constant comparison, success in every aspect of life a requirement for happiness, pride, wealth, and then to somehow find the clarity of a career path that begins IMMEDIATELY after being handed a diploma placeholder at Graduation.

In other words, there’s a strange dissonance with everyone graduating college: “I’m an adult now, why am I not successful yet?”

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GRAD REBOUNDING

I’m finding it difficult to cut the cord of the past 18 months. Perhaps I’m alone, but the adrenaline of graduation has worn off and now I’m facing a new frontier with new landmarks and people with blurred faces. Everything is new, which is both exciting and terrifying, but it doesn’t discount the old. When I think about graduating college and moving on, it feels like trying to find a rebound after going through a breakup.

I had this discussion with a classmate the day before graduation took place:

ME: “Are you walking this weekend?”

HER: “No. My boyfriend did last year, and we waited two hours to hear his name. And then he walked across the stage in about four seconds. It’s a huge waste of time. I’m not walking. Are you?”

ME: “Yeah. I’ve never walked before.”

HER: “Good luck. I’m ready to be done with this place. I could care less about walking. I’m ready to move on.”

There it is: “I’m ready to move on.” She’s been emotionally done with college for a while. Most seniors in college are. Attending classes, taking exams—it’s all rote and mechanical procedure in the weeks before graduation. Why can’t life just be all the things we’ve been preparing for?

While I understand this logic, I think it’s important to attend a ceremony at the start and end of things. The Olympics has its Opening and Closing Ceremonies, marriage its wedding and divorce proceedings, and college has its convocation and graduation. There’s something necessary in attending the start and close of a journey.

Most of my classmates were packing in a hurry to get on with “living”. But what has the past four years of college been if not a significant growth spurt? In that time, most students start in their teens, age into young adulthood, experience sex and alcohol on a consistent basis, and somehow develop an independence that is (hopefully) means not returning to the way things were before arriving on campus. Why does living take place only after the journey ends when so much living has taken place the entirety of an undergraduate degree? Blame it on age, but I disagree that college is a ceaselessly tiring and punishing gauntlet that must be endured in order to “get on with life”. In the aftermath of graduation, I think the past ten days have been necessary to process what the hell has taken place.

That’s my clouded and congested conclusion at this juncture: I’ve been lost and adrift not as a reflection of my inability to cope and move on to a new era, but as a meditation about the old one.

This is what it means to move on in a healthy way.

Just, try not to eat meals with serving sizes befitting a roaming buffalo or binge watch the entirety of Netflix’s “for you” category as a way of numbing out.

It’s better to feel the listlessness in the aftermath of graduation than run from it. The point is to feel all the things you must right now.

Otherwise, it’s a rebound into something else.

Might as well have applied for internships, then.

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PARTING KNOWLEDGE

Before my final exams, I made a point to ask my professors what advice they would give their younger selves if they could. More specifically, I asked:

“What do you know now that you didn’t when you were younger?”

Here are two noteworthy responses from my professors:

First Professor:

“I once had a therapist that said, ‘It’s like you’re hauling around an extension ladder’. By that, she meant that I was looking far ahead into the future, while reaching way back into my past. If you’ve ever carried an extension ladder before, you know how awkward it is to walk around with. But that’s how it feels to think so much about the future and constantly dig through the past—there’s no pivoting without knocking into something you didn’t need to.

“So, I asked the therapist, ‘What do I do about the ladder?’ and she said, ‘Carry a smaller one.’ Since then, I understood how unimportant it was to worry about the future and the past. None of that defines you. What matters is keeping versatile in the present. That’s where everything is happening anyways. And with a smaller ladder, you can still get up and down when you need to, just with manageable heights. It’s much more useful, I’ve found.”

Second Professor:

“I once took such pride in being introverted, until I realized it was largely an excuse to protect myself. I loved to go off by myself and think, or write, or do whatever, but always at the expense of talking with anyone. As you get older, you find the reasons you do things are not practical so much as practiced. I wanted to be an introvert more than I ever was one. And ever since I gave up on the label, I’ve been much more willing to have conversations with anyone and everyone. It hasn’t left me tired and exhausted but inspired. I have so many more good people in my life because I gave up on the illusion of introversion as an identity.

“So I would say: Rethink what you cling to for identity. Often, it’s just a way of protecting yourself instead of being open to new things and people.”

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Lastly, if you haven’t checked out the recent playlist from Quarter One of this year, I highly recommend it. There’s something there for everyone. Feel free to list your most noteworthy songs of the past while in the comments below!

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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,

SEASONS CHANGE

In the past week, the temperature in West Michigan rose to 72 degrees in Allendale, and dipped to below freezing with mild snow showers the very next day. It was the most bipolar weather conditions I’ve seen in winter here. Things have normalized since then, thankfully, but it was a sign of seasons changing: This Sunday the clocks roll forward an hour for Daylight Savings Time, March 19 is the first day of spring, and in three weeks I’ll be turning 35-years-old.

Seasons are changing.

In a month in a half, I will have graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, launching into a new season of my life. Perhaps this is a characteristic of age, but the newness of change is less frantic or scary than it used to be. I’ve been through significant change more than I can count at this point, so the thought of leaving campus to head out into the real world isn’t so intimidating.

It is, however, intimidating to many of my classmates—most of whom are 14-15 years my junior.

Attaining a BA in English Lit has been wildly different than my first go-around with college. Instead of pursuing a degree in my early twenties, I went out in the world confident that I could do without one. This was true to an extent (I certainly could have committed to numerous career paths outside of a degree of some sort). The truth is that choices are limited without a slip of paper to get into other fields. With some luck, I was able to return to to college in my thirties, which was a radically different experience. Instead of being concerned with forming an identity and the constant anxiety of who I fit in with. I was free to do the work–which was the benefit of working in all those odd jobs: Showing up and completing a day’s work is the extent of responsibility. In the many years I spent working as as a freelance writer, in advertising, and as a preschool teacher, I found there was a common theme with every workplace and its hierarchy of people and rules: Every place is different and there’s no telling what it’s like until you’re in the thick of it.

Call it life experience or wisdom from age, but the road one takes is always going somewhere. In my experience, there isn’t much need to worry about where you’ve come from.

That’s why I’m always taken aback by the epidemic of fear of failure pertaining to test scores/assignments/papers and final grades. In the logistical sense of applying for scholarships (money for tuition), grades matter, but this concern is always insulated—no one outside of college cares about grades other than which university you acquired them from.

I spoke with a classmate in my thesis class who was convinced that the rest of her life was dependent on our professor’s decision pass or fail us. “Our professor has the power to decide what happens to me, doesn’t that scare you?” she asked me.

No. Of course not. That’s because college is another season of life—and like most seasons, you experience them while they occur but without much memory for when they change. Do you remember last summer? Vaguely, I imagine. Your recollection likely goes something like this:

“It wasn’t very hot, it was nice to get outside, and I went to the beach a few times.”

Right, which isn’t very specific. You’ve moved on and forgotten. College, like last summer, will be faintly memorable like the fading tan that’s in desperate need of more sunlight.

As I’m finishing the final month and a half of classes, I often think about getting back into the real world. It’s true that college has been a strange bubble existence with its own set of rules and expectations apart from the real world. However, the value of college has been a place to harness skills, think about the world in unconventional ways, and to truly expand the mind. The tragedy of graduation, I think, is that the faucet of knowledge is suddenly turned off and it’s all the harder to keep exposed anything challenging preconceived notions about the world.

Workplaces, families, friendships, and social media all make it incredibly easy to fall into a community of practice that insulates itself. There’s no more need to pick up a textbook, read studies, or cram for a test the following morning. There is no longer a forced path to unwittingly follow to betterment. In college there was (with its due criticisms, of course), but now there’s no incentive to keep going. Post-graduation means to adapt to a new world, one of employment and promotion, of hierarchy and financial makeup, of integrating into social systems that lead to that next stage of adult life.

Seasons change, I suppose.

I’ve yet to hear who the commencement speaker will be at Grand Valley State University, but one thing is for sure: This person will be older, experienced, and will likely give wisdom to those too young to understand the full impact of what’s being said. That’s natural—I’m just now learning things that I wished made sense a decade ago, and I’m confident that I’ll feel the same way about things I wish I had known at 35 in another ten years. Whatever this speaker will say to 2024 graduates, I can echo my own sentiment:

“Appreciate the seasons.”

They come and go. The leaves wilt, the snow accrues, and the muddy puddles of spring will evaporate into the paradise of summertime. It all changes so fast, but the lesson wasn’t in recognizing that seasons come and go—it was in spending the time to notice them in the first place.

So, when someone asks about last summer or what it was like to be in college, time travel back to when that place felt real again. Summer meant sunshine, and college meant glimpsing a world that appears a wondrous, complex organism–one that was never simple to define.

It’s much like the weather this past week: Summer and winter existed within 24-hours of each other in Western Michigan. I don’t truly understand anything.

I appreciate the seasons that remind me of this.

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A NOTE ON AI GRAPHICS

Some of you may have noticed a distinct stylistic change in Weekly Post-Ed graphics form the past two weeks. There’s an obvious reason for that—they were designed using AI. And while I am naturally opposed to making graphics using AI, the past few weeks of trying out the technology has been fascinating. Viewing an image generate after transcribing a few sentences into ChatGPT might be the closest I’ve come to witnessing magic on the internet (not counting a few TikTok trends). An image is produced in under ten seconds with a level of detail that might take me hours to illustrate.

There are downsides, however. The design choices this current AI makes in graphics generation are very limited in my opinion (in terms of a flat, cartoony style), which makes it easy to identify images made with AI. There’s also a lack of authorship with the images, something that isn’t easy to explain, but something about the images feels lacking. If that makes any sense. Call it artistic integrity, but I can see the difference in something made by humans and not. There seems to be a lack of personal choice with AI generation.

All of this is to say these graphics are a short term experiment. I do not intend to rely on AI for graphics going further. The graphic designer in me will not tolerate the loss of originality with my own creative works.

So, that about explains it. Count on more personalized graphics going further, but every once in a while, if the graphic is interesting enough, I may use elements of AI as inspiration (which, frankly is where the technology thrives).

Weekly Post-Ed #68

THE WEEK AFTER

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GRAD REBOUNDING

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PARTING KNOWLEDGE

First Professor:

Second Professor:

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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,

Weekly Post-Ed #65

SEASONS CHANGE

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A NOTE ON AI GRAPHICS

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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,