Prior to my twins selecting their respective colleges, I was pretty sure I knew where they’d end up. Mother’s intuition is, after all, a powerful thing. With my son’s focus on Division I swimming and an urban campus, I knew he’d end up out East. And with my daughter’s passion for marine biology and a campus filled with abundant green space, I was pretty certain she would be on the West coast. I was half right.
So, it stands to reason when my students graduated from college, my odds were 50/50 that I could intuit where they settled. Both in terms of location and the job itself. The truth? This time I wasn’t even close. But the best part was they both ended up exactly where they were supposed to be. They are happy and thriving. But the road getting there was filled with more than a few potholes.
The Job Process Has Changed for College Grads
Back in the “old days,” when I was in college, Career Placement Services was my sole source of interviews for finding a job. At the risk of dating myself, the Internet wasn’t yet a thing and we actually signed up for interviews in person. With pen and paper.
Fast forward three decades. After my kids used Career Services to help refine their cover letters and resumes during their junior year of college, they never went back. Instead, they searched for job opportunities exclusively online.
For our daughter, a zoologist, the search was all in one place, since zoos and aquariums post job openings on a national, online job board. Our son, who was a mechanical engineer, worked LinkedIn and other career networking websites, in addition to reaching out to alumni in jobs that interested him. The process for both kids was akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Each applied to over 100 jobs and had countless interviews before receiving a single offer.
Lest you get discouraged, keep in mind that my college seniors were looking for jobs just a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. Not an ideal job market, and even less so for recent grads. But one key lesson emerged – today’s college graduates need to be extra vigilant when applying for fulltime jobs. Unless they are lucky enough to have an offer from a previous internship.
Expect the Unexpected
My best advice to parents of students graduating from college is to throw your own expectations out the window. You might end up being pleasantly surprised at the direction your young adult’s job search takes. Even if it twists and turns more than you would like. You may have a vision for the type of job, company, salary, and even location that is the best fit for your graduate. But the simple fact is that it’s their life and their decision. Your job is to watch, wait and offer advice only when asked.
Proving that the best laid plans can change, my son, who had planned to stay out East after graduation declined a job offer in the city where he attended college. It was a basic engineering job, not product design which was his focus, with a lower salary than was commiserate with the university he had attended. We fully supported his decision.
That was the first twist. The next turn happened when he came home to visit for a few weeks after graduation and ended up staying the whole summer. He conducted his job search from his childhood bedroom, focusing on opportunities close to home so that he could pursue his passion for the mountain lifestyle. When a friend from high school found a great house to rent, our son signed the lease before having a fulltime job. Then a few weeks later, accepted a position in a field that wasn’t even on his radar, which he absolutely loves. Never in a million years would I have guessed he would live close enough to be home for Sunday dinner.
Alternatively, when our daughter accepted a job in the middle of the country, in a state none of us had ever been to, I was gob smacked. She was the one who had been planning to live at home the summer after graduation, working as an intern at the local zoo. But when she was offered a fulltime, benefited job, a rarity in a field that usually requires two years of unpaid experience, she knew she had to take it. And despite the discomfort of 100-degree heat in the summer and tornado warnings in the fall, she loves the job, the people and most of all the 20 stingrays she knows by name.
Support and Encourage Your College Graduate
It’s easy to look back now and chuckle at the absurdity that my kids ended up doing entirely different things than I expected. And that my mother’s intuition predicted none of it. In the moment, I had two choices – fight the inevitable or get on board and support each of them to the best of my ability.
For our son that meant giving him the flexibility to come and go as he pleased. Taking countless mountain and road bike rides when he wasn’t locked in his room on Zoom interviews. But that also meant trusting him to lead his own job search and not second guessing when he applied to a bike job in Wisconsin or a virtual reality job in California.
Supporting our daughter was the exact opposite of the hands-off approach. Instead, I accompanied her to the city that would become her new home three times in four weeks. Once to look for apartments. Not an easy task during COVID when the housing market was tight. The second to drive her car cross country and move her into temporary housing. Which, despite driving across multiple states with boring topography, is a memory I will treasure forever. We even stopped at a winery in a cornfield in the middle of Kansas, which she proclaimed, “good for her soul.”
The third and final time was when my husband and I drove the U-Haul with all her belongings and settled her into her first apartment without a roommate. Was it a lot of work with only minimal sleep? You bet. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Because she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that we fully supported her job choice. And were beyond proud of her taking a chance and moving to a new city, far, far away.
The moral of the story for parents of soon-to-be college grads is simple and hard at the same time. Let go. Of their job search. Of your expectations. And of your kids. Because the reality is once they graduate from college, they’re done being kids. They are ready to enter the capital “A” world of adulting. And our job is to let them.
Beautifully written post with much needed insight. I have been strengthened this past year by your grace and support of your kiddos during this journey.
Thank you Tracy for your kind words. The whole purpose of my book (and these blogs) is to make parents feel less alone and supported in the process of letting their kids go. Whether it be to college or out into the big, scary, capital “A” adulting real world. Thanks for reading, Liz