LIV. The "Real World" as Seen by a Post-Grad -

Don’t you hate it when you wish that you had the life of another?

It seems pathetic.

If you really wanted to do something with your life, then please, by all means, do it. Nothing is holding you back so make it happen.

We hear that all the time. I even tell myself that sometimes.

I finished college and I have been accepted somewhere of my choice for further studies. This is my choice. I want to be a surgeon. I truly want to go to medical school and I have wanted to since my first memory of interacting with a doctor.

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A Girl’s Dreams Consciously Not Applied:

Although I love (Indian) dancing and wish that I could pursue dance on a technical level and contributing hours a day for practice, I know that such a profession, living in the United States especially, is not practical.

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A Girl Turned Young Adult’s Life Goals, In the Process of being Realized:

In all honesty though, I have always been academically inclined in terms of enjoying learning and enjoying garnering knowledge, according to predetermined tents of the correct type of pedagogy.

A physician is no doubt what I want to be.

I always have had to work hard to do decently and have had to work 10 times as hard to do well which has only occurred rarely.

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Sitting at home for the past month I have achieved some things that I had wanted to do during this past month, for my betterment.

In our early twenties I think we all become struck with a life crisis:

We realize that we’re not getting any younger and if we want to make something happen that will have a positive life-long lasting effect, than now is the time.

So, having just turned twenty-two I have:

1. Definitively cut out all meat from my diet.

2. I have joined a gym and go five days a week.

3. I have rested and

4. I have gained my appetite back with a vengeance.

After the gym I come home and essentially, I’m home - I rest and I eat and then mentally prepare myself to wake up the next morning and go to the gym to exercise.

I have tried to get employed, I have applied to innumerable internships, I have sent out my resume, I have even e-mailed non-for-profit organizations abroad = Nothing.

All this effort, drive, and e-mails have amounted to nothing. No replies, no requests, no offers - nothing.

What am I lacking? These opportunities, (or lack thereof, is a more appropriate way of putting it), do not even require GPA which I see, as far as excluding personality flaws, is my only weakness.

I have tried to get into contact with doctors whom I can shadow: No interest on their part.

I have sent multiple e-mails to advisers, have made multiple calls and left messages to my future university administrators but have met with zero answers, zero responses, zero interest - Nothing.

I cannot register for classes if no one advises me.

What is going on?

Is this what recession feels like?

I am so driven and I do not want to sit at home. I want to travel and observe and experience.

I’m trying in earnest to make it happen, but nothing is happening.

All this built up apprehension has accumulated and today I just had to shed it off so I took two minutes and did what humans do when frustrated: I teared up and let out an inaudible whimper - I didn’t cry though.

I’m happy, really I am. I’m just frustrated: I’m that stubborn college grad always choosing not to believe that recession and the real world is difficult and then when I finally meet the post-grad real world I find that it is not exactly as described, but comes pretty close.

I think my whimpering session, if you will, was a combination of a college graduate realizing the real world is not a campus and having a flashback of myself as a girl thinking that everything will literally be at my finger tips.

I was wrong, everything is not at my fingertips.

Instead, everything is right in front of me;

We all are face-to-face with everything and us post-grads have been inhabiting the real-world long before our twenty-something year old selves.

Here is to staying positive and keeping at it -