Maintaining Relationships

Maintaining relationships of any kind in college and after college can be difficult. With technology today, you would think it would make things easier: FaceTime with your mom, texting your boyfriend, Facebooking your best friend...the list goes on. However, technology makes things harder for a lot of people. Mom won't be able to give you a hug on a bad day. You will miss your boyfriend's voice. You'll miss those silly moments with your best friend. It's important to manage your time well so that you can spend time with those people that mean the most to you and not get behind on school work. College is about working hard to ensure a happy, successful future, but it's also about having fun with the people that mean the most to you.

Just when you settled into a comfortable routine of maintaining relationships from home, you're about ready to graduate. After graduating, you miss the people you became friends with at school. It's important to keep in touch with professors that helped you throughout school. As a recent graduate from La Roche, there are several professors I want to keep in contact with. One of the best ways to do this is by email since I live about 45 minutes away from school. There are several professors that are curious about what I'm up to since I was lucky enough to find a job right before I graduated. It also pays to keep in touch with professors if you're having a hard time finding a job. This is especially applicable with majors that rely on networking to get jobs, such as graphic design. Many of my professors started to recommend people in my graduating class for jobs in the spring semester. Of course, it's not just professors that you want to keep in touch with from college. I have both a friend and a boyfriend an hour or so away from where I live, in opposite directions. Worse yet, they have opposite work schedules.

Being busy is a thing that happens naturally and when you get busy, people tend to drift apart. There is such a thing as balance and it's important to use college to start to find it before you get even busier upon graduation. Remember to keep in touch!!

A New Kind of Time Management

Everyone always says you need to learn the skill of time management (if you haven't already mastered it) by the time you get to college and that if you haven't learned it already, college is the perfect time to do so. Since graduating, I'm finding it more important than ever before to be good at managing my time. The bad part is...I'm not doing so well at it. In college, you have breaks between classes, evenings, when you're supposed to be sleeping, weekends, and the morning before class to get any school work done that you put off or haven't gotten done. If you've had a job during college, you're probably getting pretty darn good at managing your time.

I can honestly say since graduating, it's harder than ever to manage my time. I knew when I graduated that I had a job using my degree, but I wasn't really prepared for what that meant. I was definitely used to being busy and cramming things that needed done into the small time frames I had during the school year. I had an internship and was taking summer classes in addition to doing 10 hours of work study a week during the summer '10 semester. I barely managed that. My La Roche days were Monday and Wednesday from 7:30 to 5 and it was a 45 minute commute from home (each way). My internship days were Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 8:30 to 5:30 or 6 with a commute varying from 40 minutes to almost 2 hours sometimes each way. In addition, I had massive amounts of homework. There's something to be said for finding ways to get things done when you're busy. All through college I had worked hard to keep myself busy and constantly learning. Thus, I ended up having very little free time. Now that I work Monday through Friday, 8-5 with only a half hour commute, I have from 6pm-11pm free as well as the entirety of the weekend. Of course, I have things I need to do like cleaning my room and other small organizational tasks. I have things I want to do like reading and teaching myself more things that will help me keep on top of new happenings in my industry (graphic design). There are also the things I just want to do for fun like play Super Mario Brothers for Wii, hang out with my friends from college, and take walks with my dog. I'm not sure why, but it feels like work lasts all day. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE my job, but it does take away all my daylight hours during the day. I also know I need to go to bed by 12 at the absolute latest if I'm going to be worth anything the next day at work (especially because it's a creative job, which can be mentally taxing at times). Unfortunately, I'm still at the point where I wake up in time to get ready for work and not do anything else, leave for work, work till 5, come home, eat dinner, and sit around all evening. If I try to meet up with people after work, even if I get home at a decent hour, I'm exhausted when I get home and into the next day. As of right now, weekends are spent out and about at least half the time because it's summer and there are many activities to do. As a result, I have a bunch of small things I need to catch up on and I never end up leaving time for them! I would say time management is hands down the biggest adjustment from college to the real world. Well...that and maintaining relationships and friends from college, which I will get into more next week.

Entering the Real World

Since graduating on May 7, I can say for a fact that I wouldn't be where I am today without having attended La Roche College. At the portfolio show for Graphic and Interior Design seniors, I was approached by several professionals. One of these professionals contacted me for an interview. The interview went very well, thanks to the advanced and unique opportunities that I sought out through my education at La Roche and was able to talk about in my interview. Because of my unique experiences, I ended up being offered a position as a Graphic Designer at Media Frogg Marketing and Communications in Zelienople before I graduated. I started working at Media Frogg on May 16, 2011 and I can honestly say I enjoy going to work every day. I'm doing what I love and working with great people.

Two important lessons:

-If you want to learn about something specific that's not covered, find out more information and take an independent study with a professor who's willing to learn about the same thing. It will definitely put you ahead in your chosen career field and La Roche makes it very easy.

-Give your all in an interview. Let the interviewer know that you're passionate about the job and don't be afraid to stick your neck out for it (without being obnoxious). Interviewers want to know that they're hiring someone who really wants to be there with the intention of making an investment in their company.