The 5 Things Every New Graduate Should Know

A guest post by Dawn Papandrea, CollegeSurfing.com

When you graduate college, a lot of people will offer you cliché advice that sounds like a compilation of every commencement speech you’ve ever heard. But before you go out into the world to make your mark, fight what you believe in, remember the valuable lessons you learned, and embrace your future, try on some of these practical tips for grads that actually mean something beyond being quotable speech material…

Know how to use social media. I’ve been to three very different professional conferences this year, and I can say with certainty, the theme that came up again and again at all of them was that social media is here to stay. You must get familiar with social media if you’re not already, no matter what your industry, and you must use it responsibly (unlike a certain former congressman we’ve all heard about). Get the drinking montages off of your Facebook page. Create a smart-looking LinkedIn profile. Mind your tweets on Twitter. Learn how to leverage the “noise” instead of having it knock you down.

Figure out where the jobs are. Having a passion for a particular field is great, but it’s not enough for landing a job in said field. You need to do your career homework in order to understand what it takes to break into your industry of choice. Sometimes, it’s all about the college degree; other times you’ll need to have a portfolio of work examples; still others may require a move to a big city. Know what you’re getting into, and use that information to your advantage.

Realize you don’t know everything. If anyone told me 12 years ago that the day would come when I’d rarely pick up a pen or have a stack of paper on my desk, I’d have cracked up. I’m a journalist, after all. However, as I’ve seen firsthand in my industry, the digital age has transformed the way I do my work, and I had better be willing to adapt and learn if I want to survive. If you want to be successful, you should expect to think beyond your job title, take additional courses, get certified, or perform on-the-job training at some point in your career. Otherwise, you’ll be left behind.

Be prepared for career shake-ups. Along the lines of the above, things happen that can affect the way you do your job, and you need to go with the flow. The world of accounting changed forever, for example, with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which aimed to reform standards of corporate responsibility after the financial scandals of Enron and company. And, as I alluded above, technology has certainly changed the face of business (just ask your local video store owner… if you can find one).

Accept that what you learned in college actually does matter. Why in the world should an English major take an accounting class? If you plan to be a computer programmer, why is a speech class required? Having been out in the world for some time, trust me when I say a liberal arts core curriculum does matter. I’m so thankful for the business minor I forced my way through every time I have to analyze an Excel spreadsheet or understand things like copyright law and contracts. And you’d be shocked if you read some of the correspondence of high-level executives, wrought with misspellings and grammar errors. So yes, those term papers are necessary! Finally, getting a job and getting ahead is all about making connections with real people. And you never know how those connections will happen. Perhaps you were in the same fraternity, or you both minored in classical music. The point is, all of the learning you do can be useful in some way once you learn how to harness it.

Dawn Papandrea is the editor of The CollegeSurfing Insider blog.