How to Adapt Life After College As many students start to graduate from college, they enter a totally new phase in their lives.
By Ceren Cubukcu •
This story originally appeared on Personal Branding Blog
As many students start to graduate from college, they enter a totally new phase in their lives. Not only they will have to adapt working full-time, they will also have to adapt to their new environments outside of work. Below are some advices for the new graduates that will make this transition smoother and are not thought in schools.
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Set yourself goals
Until you finish college, everything in your life is well defined. First, you get good grades in high school so you can get into a college and then, you choose your college courses which are required by your curriculum or recommended by your advisor. Finally, you try to get good grades again so that you can have a high GPA. Unfortunately, life itself is not well defined like academics. There are ups and downs of it. Therefore, it is up to you to define your life. Start defining your life by setting goals to yourself. What do you want to do in your career? Do you want to go work in corporate world or do you want to start your own business? Or do you want to stay in academia? First, find the answers of these questions and then, make a list of goals.
Change your habits
When you are attending college, you can easily fit your classes into a 3-day schedule and leave two days off or you can choose all the afternoon classes in order to stay up all night and sleep until noon. However, when you have a full-time job, you are expected to wake up early and come to work in the morning. Also, you need to come to work every day so you can't have anymore 3-day schedules. In order to have a smooth transition, start sleeping early so you can wake up early and be energetic. Moreover, eat your lunches at the same time every day around noon so your body can adapt to this new schedule.
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Learn to make a budget
If you have student loans, once you are out of college and land a job, you will start paying them off. Thus, you need to manage your budget wisely. It is important to pay off your debt on time so that you can have a good credit score. In the future, this score will be very important if you want to buy a new car, a house or even apply to a new credit card. Once you are blacklisted by credit score companies, it is very hard to get out of that list.
