It's only the Prologue

Looking back at roughly a couple of years ago—nice sunny afternoon underneath a canopy of wispy clouds, suffocating but still smiling in an oversized black graduation gown and a morat board hat on my head, pretending to listen to the graduation day speaker while on a sideline chat with batch mates whom I might have never seen again after the last signature on my clearance sheet was signed—I shouldn’t have thrown my graduation hat after we sang the Silliman Song.

It was not the right moment to do that, I guess. And I say this as a word of advice to all those who are graduating this March. Hold your breath and don’t heave the huge sigh of relief just yet. Keep that hat on your head. Graduation, as they say, is not the ending, much more the epilogue.

Let’s just put it this way: School is just a prologue, an introduction. That time when the last fire cracker has died out after sending a burst of lights in the sky, that time when the music has died down after the graduation after-party, that time when you finally wake up and realize that you’re never going back to school again and that it’s time to pack your things and finally send them back home—that’s when chapter one of the story of the real world finally begins.

And the moment you bag your first real, decent job, that’s the time when you breathe the sigh of relief and toss that hat in the air.

I waited for the job that I have now for six months after graduation and it hasn’t been easy. The real world is harsh and no amount of preparation or medals can spare you from the heartache of having to burn your butt on that seat waiting for your turn at an interview only to find out three weeks after that it’s time to move on and look for another company.

I’ve a faced a dizzying number of interviewers who told me the same old thing: ‘So, tell us something about yourself.” And honest to goodness, I can’t remember how many variations I’ve come up with just to answer that question. Job hunting—I’ve marked it down in my personal burn book, under the section ‘The Top Ten Thing They Make You Do in Hell’. It’s right next to ‘Dealing with Arrogant People who Think They are God’s Gift to the World’ and just a notch before ‘Enduring a Boring Class’.

The entire job hunting experience drove home quite a handful of realizations:

First is that although your Latin honors will give you an unprecedented edge over other applicants (hey, it’s a confidence booster, what can I say?), it doesn’t automatically mean that you get the job. For most companies, this is highly appreciated but then honestly, it just doesn’t hold much weight unless you are in a very specialized field. More often than not, the people at HR or anyone for that matter who is interviewing you won’t even know what those latin honors mean. To put it simply, most of them just won’t give a damn.

Second, it’s all about experience. Good for you if you’re able to stock up on those internships and even that part time job while you were still in school. Believe me, it comes handy because it leads me to the third point which is that many stable companies today would rather go for mid-career hires than those who are fresh out of school with no job experience. It’s just too costly to train fresh grads and it takes a lot of time to wait for fresh grads to get a hang of the job.

Fourth, just because your 99th interview didn’t work out and yet another interviewer thought that you’re too over-qualified or that you simply don’t fit the job, cease and desist from jumping from Marcelo Fernan Bridge and taking the plunge into the deep dark waters below. Your interviewers’ perceptions may not necessarily be the real picture and you do know that it’s their loss for not hiring someone as brilliant as you. Take a shot at another company and at another job opening. Quitting should never be in your vocabulary.

Finally, ask a lot of questions about how the company’s plans for its employees and know how much you’re worth. Don’t just pounce into any kind of job. What’s worse than having no job is getting into the wrong job and tying yourself up into hardwork that is neither important nor meaningful to you.

Job hunting will be the longest how-many-months of your life in the real world. When you get the job, adjusting to the birth pains of that new first job will be a tad bit more agonizing.

This is not to scare you, fresh grad. This is just to say that when you’re over and done with the hell that’s called job hunting and bag your first job, stick to it even when the going gets tough and the tough gets rough. You’re lucky to even get a job in a country where millions are jobless and where millions more only live through subsistence income.

When you get your first payslip in your first job in a decent company, that’s your cue to sigh in relief and toss that hat up high.

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