Surviving your 20s

Some new graduates have a hard time negotiating the post-college roller coaster.
By JACKIE BURRELL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Today's families are so riveted on higher education, it's easy to forget that someday their brilliant offspring are going to encounter the real world.
Graduation happens. And what happens after that, says psychological researcher Marcos Salazar, can be a decade of turbulence.
Salazar's just-published book, "The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide," is the latest entry in a new self-help genre that began in 2001 with Abby Miller's "Quarterlife Crisis."
To Salazar, life after college isn't so much a crisis as an emotional roller coaster. It's a time when twentysomethings figure out who they are, where they're going and how they're going to get food on the table, a roof over their heads, pay off their student loans and -- oh, yeah, find love, friendship and purpose along the way.
Older generations may scoff at terms like "post-college blues," says Salazar, but that's because they've forgotten what it feels like to find one's way in a world brimming with too much possibility.
An active mix
Add in today's rapidly changing ultra-competitive global economy, outsourced entry-level jobs, and a sometimes profound disconnect between what colleges teach and what employers need, says Salazar, and you've got millions of anguished twentysomethings who didn't think it was going to be like this.
"All the graduation speeches say 'Be true to yourself,' but how exactly do you do that?" asks Salazar.
"It's an evolutionary process, psychologically, and there's no one magic bullet."
It doesn't help that parents, neighbors and peers are watching you take the leap.
"There was that expectation to graduate, get a job, start working," says Elizabeth Kotin, who graduated from UCLA in 2001. "It wasn't that I felt there was so much pressure with my first job. You're getting your feet wet. Nobody stays there for 10 years. But I started to realize I wasn't doing stuff that really interested me. I was living for the weekend to come. Post-college life was a little harder than people had told me."
It was even more difficult for Abby Miller. That cap and gown took her from accomplished scholar and campus leader to a scared twentysomething, with no sense of purpose.
"I didn't know what to do with my life," she says. "My friends were scattered all over the world. I was living at home with my parents, temping, and starting over socially, too. I didn't know it was supposed to be this way."
Having discussions
Those thoughts are echoed by hundreds of twentysomethings on Miller's quarterlifecrisis.com message boards. Discussion threads carry titles like "I'm told I don't have a life" and "What on earth ever made me think I wanted to be an administrator???"
The problem, says Salazar, is that it takes more than a diploma and r & eacute;sum & eacute; to transition from college to the working world. Graduates have to separate from their old identity and leave college behind.
That was the challenge for Ericka Smith, who, armed with a degree from Berkeley in architecture and a profession she didn't like, continued living like a student.
"I still lived in a sorority for six months [after graduation], so I hung out there," she says. "Kept doing the college thing, going to bars, maintaining friendships with college friends, not meeting new people."
After she left the sorority and struck out on her own, it took Smith five job-hops to find her path. She dabbled in marketing, moved to Los Angeles and moved back again. Finally, at 32, she found her calling as an events planner for the Northern California Alzheimer's Association, a cause she calls "a personal passion."
That's the key, says Salazar. Explore options, listen to your "inner signals" and find the thing that makes you thrive. And realize it's an evolution everyone experiences. The happy ones understand that and accept it for the process it is.
Or they luck out.
Stuck to their plans
Or they planned really, really well, and didn't change their minds.
Berkeley graduate Vu-Bang Nguyen programmed his career path meticulously, right through a master's degree in city planning. Internships with the city of Berkeley helped him work his way into a comfortable gig as assistant planner for the town of Los Gatos.
But most of his friends are still stuck on the twentysomething roller coaster. They've job-hopped, worried and doubted. Part of the problem, Nguyen says, is that they didn't think about the post-graduation world until they were in it.
"The goal before you're 18 is really to get into college, not beyond that," he says. "Especially in high school, the question was never 'What do you want to do when you grow up?' It was always 'Where do you want to go to school?'"
College provides a "theoretical basis," Nguyen says, but social dynamics and work flow management are learned on the job. He learned people skills -- the ones Salazar and other psychologists call "emotional intelligence" -- through internships.
"A quarter of my friends went back to [grad] school because they didn't feel their undergraduate was enough," Nguyen says. "The ones with career problems probably didn't work in college. Now they're in jobs they don't like."