Graduates, Here's What You Should Be Hearing

Summer is almost here, which means - thankfully -
that commencement season is drawing to a close.
Universities everywhere have spent the past month locked in a reality-TV-style rumble over who can draw the best graduation speaker.
You want someone famous, but not too controversial. Controversial speakers give easily offended undergraduates yet another reason to protest. You want someone who won't ruffle feathers, but it's OK, at least according to Villanova University officials, if he has feathers - the college chose Big Bird (actor Caroll Spinney) to deliver its commencement address. Villanova students complained, as students do, but they chose the wrong battle. If there's anything to protest, it's the inane advice most speakers dispense. Reach for the stars! Follow your dreams! Couple these platitudes with the metal detectors that parents and graduates endure to accommodate top government wonks, and you understand why the
University of Albany stopped finding high-profile speakers in 2002
and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst quit the practice in 2003.
That's not to say that the mortar-board set doesn't need advice. On
June 5, 1969, the day I graduated from college, I loaded all of my
earthly possessions into my car to drive to the room I'd just rented in
Brookings, S.D. There, it dawned on me that I would
be reaching for the stars and following my dreams while sleeping on
an air mattress and living on take-home pay of $110 a month while in
graduate school. All I had to comfort me was the schadenfreude I felt
as many of my classmates who'd been hired by banking, consulting and retail
firms at the height of the boom were told, shortly after graduation,
not to show up.
Most of us survived graduate school and our first years in the Real World, however,
despite the bills and leaky ceilings.
Life does get better. But it would get better sooner if colleges
would drop the "Reach for the Stars!" nonsense and hand out fliers
with these Real World Adjustment Suggestions I wish I'd heard
instead:
• Dr. Seuss' Oh, the Places You'll Go! climbs the best-seller list
every year, but don't be fooled. Most people aren't going anywhere.
Your good grades won't launch you out of middle management or give
you big breaks in your artistic career. You can be a Rhodes Scholar
and still never land a job that impresses the munchkins who visit
the office for "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day."
• You'll lose every nice umbrella, but that ugly
orange-and-black-striped one will stay with you till you die.
• Switch jobs at least once in your first years out of school. The
bottom is a lousy place to start, but it's an even lousier place to
stay.
• Money doesn't buy you love; it buys you freedom. Save like crazy.
Six months of living expenses piled up means you can quit a job you
hate.
• Ask the phone and cable companies for the first appointment of the
day to avoid the nebulous "8 a.m.-2 p.m." window.
• Gourmet ramen noodle recipe: Add celery and spinach. Cook to
taste.
• You make your own luck. Really. Researcher Richard Wiseman, author
of The Luck Factor, followed hundreds of people for 10 years. Lucky
people, he discovered, added variety to their lives to increase the
chance of something wonderful happening. They also looked -
relentlessly - on the bright side. Wiseman posed a scenario: In a
bank, an armed robber fires and hits your arm. Unlucky people
bemoaned being in the bank. Lucky people said, "I could have been
shot in the head!"
• Thanks to the Internet, anyone can find anything you've ever
written. So think twice before penning that hilarious blog entry
about watching your neighbor wander around his kitchen naked, unless
you think potential employers, dates or your neighbor will find it
enlightening. The same hods true for MySpace and Facebook.
• Travel is the ultimate cheap luxury. A night in a hostel on the
beach in Ko Samui, Thailand, costs less than two cocktails in New
York. But travel now, when you're young enough to mistake food
poisoning for a bad hangover.
• Never go on a first date on Valentine's Day.
• If you share living quarters with one other person, it's
immediately obvious who left the dishes in the sink. If you live
with three people, on the other hand, you can let the dishes pile up
with impunity.
• No amount of résumé-polishing and font-obsessing will trump
finding competent, connected people who want you to succeed.
• You become a lot less fun once you have to wake up at 7 a.m. for
work every day. I'm not saying you'll never do body shots again; I'm
just saying you'll probably do them at 9 p.m.
• Life is not school. There is no equivalent of a degree-requirement
list to tell you how to become successful in most fields. You have
to plan where you want to be and plan the steps you'll take to get
there. Some people spend years in school acquiring graduate degrees
they neither want nor need because the freedom to choose life
outside the structure of academia is too scary. A masters' degree in
fine arts won't make you a painter. Painting will.
• If you leave a half-eaten chocolate bar on your dresser, it will
attract bugs and possibly mice.
• In the end, the Real World, just like college, is a series of
choices to be made with imperfect information. You think Big Bird
would be a good graduation speaker, so you hire him. Then a poll
comes out saying 68% of Villanova students would have preferred
someone else. So it goes. But here's a platitude worthy of a
commencement: Not taking risks is itself a risk - that you'll never
have the life you want.