Graduation is more than walking across a stage and adding a sentence to your resume the next day. Come May 6, students are going to be thrown into another new stage of life–their lives after Sinclair.
We’re stuck at a time in America where education is becoming a common expectation and increasingly available. With more degrees coming out, the less valuable your degree becomes in the market—unless you do extra to bring attention to yourself.
What it boils down to is that simply, your degree doesn’t define you. If you’re the same person before attending college as you are at graduation, you have likely missed a huge part of the experience as a student.
As a student, you are a dynamic being. You didn’t attend university with the intent not to learn anything. To learn is to change. At graduation, we’re celebrating the changes we go through from one portion of our life into the next.
Change is horrifying most of the time, but we get used to managing it the further on we get into life. The degree is a nice touch, and it will look cute all framed somewhere, but it’s not the degree that’s going to get you places—it’s you.
You need to take ownership of graduation and make it your graduation.
Do you remember who you were when you came here the first time? Are you succeeding in the progression you wanted to see yourself have in this time in your life? If you’re not, you’re not alone.
Recent graduates face an uphill battle with low youth employment rates, particularly in rough economic times. Many move back with their family to pay off student debt. The economic issues are uniform, with even the most prestigious colleges facing higher than average graduate unemployment rates.
Getting back on track is a part of graduation. You could be using your certificate to land a job in your desired field, some go on to pursue a higher degree, some join the workforce or work in fields outside their degree, but the point is to reassess your goals in life.
In order to reach a goal, you’ve got to think heavily about it. There’s a lot of background work in goal setting that often goes unsaid.
When you really want something, you have got to want it from your entire person. Otherwise, it’s a whim and won’t be sustained through the tumultuous experience of life.
Find out what your person wants entirely. You don’t go from having nothing to getting what you want out of the blue. Even winning the lottery requires you to play your odds. In life, if you play your odds with you as your first and foremost advocate, your chances are astronomically higher that you can get what you need.
Graduation doesn’t have to be all “out with the old, in the with the new in mentality.” You’re a very different person, but that person still went through all the stages to get you where you are.
You’re not going to walk across the stage and suddenly enunciate, precisely, all of your eccentricities and start some obscure, metaphysical book club just because you’ve graduated with an associate degree.
Keep being a dynamic person. Keep being you, but realize that this graduation isn’t the end and it’s not some miraculous beginning either. It’s a part of your life, and it will be what you make it.
That’s the constant in life: our perspective. Your degree isn’t going to change your perspective out of the blue.
Be sure to keep yourself motivated and grounded as you continue on from Sinclair. Getting where you’re going while forgetting where you came from is a recipe for losing yourself.
Although I can’t do much else but wish everyone the best luck in our present and futures, there’s one connection we all share as graduates. Out of all the uncertainties that lie before us, remember–you will always be a Tartan.
Barton Kleen
Managing Editor