Panicked? About to graduate? Here's how to take the terror out of graduation...

Graduation is fun, thrilling, relieving, and SCARY. Being peppered with questions like "So what are you gonna do now?" and "how much student debt do you have??" can trigger anxiety that will rival your Biochemistry final. But it can be avoided. How? Follow me...

1. Prepare EARLY. You know your graduation date. Everything you own is covered in Class of 22 stickers. So it should come as no surprise when you fill our your gown rental form. Take that knowledge, and use it. If you're considering graduate school, sign up for your GRE prep class no later than Junior year. Take the exam the summer before your Senior year. If you're headed to the workforce, get an internship the summer before your Senior year. Don't know where to start? Your professors, career office, and internships.com are great resources.

2. No matter where you are going after college, ask your favorite professors for letters of recommendation (see blog post on effective letter-asking). Visit the nice lady (or gentleman) who runs your campus career services office and ask them to mock interview you. They'll also help you polish your resume. Send that baby around to your profs too, or some staff members at your school, for feedback. These folks see hundreds of these puppies each year, so they know a thing or two about a good (and a bad) resume.

3. Sign up for job boards on Indeed, and Glassdoor. Did you know you can sign up for alerts on these job boards, so whenever "research associate" pops up in your city, they send you an email? And get yourself a rockin LinkedIn profile. Listen, if you put half as much energy into your LinkedIn account as you did your instagram page, you'd be landing world class coin at a fantastic job.

4. Unsure of where to go or what to do? Time for some google stalking. Cruise the web (LinkedIn is a good resource, Facebook sometimes, Insta maybe) looking for people who have the job you want. Then check out how they got there. You can google their name to find an online resume, maybe their website has an "About me" page, or you can just DM them. If you see a woman wearing incredible clothes and traveling everywhere and she's a buyer for Anthropologie, find out what her degree was in, what her first job out of college was, where did she go from there? And then do that.

GO. BE THE CHANGE.

#graduation #jobs