In my final Post Grad dispatch to you all, I want to pull back the curtain and explain why you should act like a journalist in your post-grad years, even if it’s not your career.
The task of the Post Grad column was a bit of a paradox from the beginning. Columnists for newspapers often have considerable subject matter expertise from years of reporting, formal study or professional work. I wasn’t really an expert in anything yet except my own life, so I wrote about that — relying on my own limited experiences, those of my peers and the advice of experts and mentors.
I found pretty quickly that, for me, the writing part is easy — it’s forming opinions that was a challenge. In my writing, I tagged my own mundane life experiences with lessons. Looking back, it has helped me to feel more confident in my beliefs and reasons behind my decision-making.
For example, in the column about post-grad sobriety, I reflected on a conversation I had with my dad about feeling embarrassed about being a nondrinker in college. Through the process of writing that column, I was able to reaffirm my reasons for not drinking to myself and be honest about how I had struggled with feeling embarrassed about my sobriety in the past.
The process of turning anecdotes into written lessons is sort of like journaling about your day: taking time after the fact to privately dissect a mundane conversation or event to coax out an opinion, conclusion or argument. You don’t have to put your diary entries in The Post, but I think it can be quite helpful to keep a journal for regular reflection. Only about 17 percent of Americans do, but the benefits — such as reduced anxiety, better decision-making and improved physical health — are well documented.
It’s not just the act of writing that makes a journalist, though. An article is only as good as a journalist’s questions (and their follow-ups). In your own post-grad life, arriving at the right questions through introspection and conversation with your peers is as important as finding answers during this turbulent and uncertain phase of life.
There were some questions I knew I wanted to explore from the beginning of Post Grad, such as “Why do recent grads struggle to find fulfilling jobs?”, “Why are young people delaying marriage so much?”, “Why is housing so expensive?” and “How do you deal with familial conflicts during the post-grad years?” These were questions I was thinking about in relation to my own life and experiences: I was a recent grad who didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career, I had butted heads with my parents over my life decisions, I wasn’t married and I was blown away by the price of a studio apartment in my city.
But as in life, sometimes you don’t even know what you’re confused about — or what questions you want answered. This is where staying connected with a community can be very helpful: The most important Post Grad questions I wrote about came from other recent graduates. I did a lot of reporting with the help of Instagram, asking people what their post-grad questions were. The inspiration for the columns on entrepreneurship, making more IRL friends and combating loneliness all came to me from readers.
While tips and story ideas can come from anywhere, a good journalist knows how to make use of expert sources in their reporting. An expert voice adds context, improves the reporter’s understanding of the issue, and helps maintain reader trust and confidence. In your own life, you need expert sources, too — mentors, teachers, parents, older friends. In the columns, we covered how to reach out to potential mentors with specific asks and how to maintain good relationships with them. Interviewing experts helped me learn more about tricky topics such as navigating conflict or money management. Learning how to ask for help and advice is a skill that pays dividends, whether you’ll be writing a column with the information or not.
There’s a stack of full notebooks in the back of my closet filled with reflections, ideas, bad poems and embarrassing stories. Sometimes I cringe a little thinking of those entries, histories of a past self who was less informed, capable and mature. But I know writing them was necessary to my development as a person. I think someday I’ll look back at this collection of Post Grad essays in a similar way. Five years from now, I might change my views, develop better questions and better answers than the ones I’ve weaved into these columns. But I know the process was still worth it, still absolutely essential.
As a final piece of Post Grad advice, I encourage you all to write in this next chapter (and, if you’d like, to keep following my own writing here!).
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