Budgeting
Learning to budget comes in handy with resourcefulness as well. If you’re forced to be on a budget – as in, you have no choice but to budget your money out, you’ll learn how to scrimp and save.
That way, when you’re in the work force and your budget (hopefully) isn’t as tight as when you were a college student, you’ll still make smarter financial decisions.
Social Drinking
The modern professional is presented with plenty of opportunities to have a few pints, pitchers, or cocktails after work. If you didn’t go to college and learn that there’s always a time and a place for this type of event, you may not have been able to control yourself.
You now know that your work supervisor finds it much less entertaining if you show up for the job late, hung-over, or generally unproductive. Sure, you could order that last call drink on a Wednesday night. But Thursday morning comes awfully fast and you won’t have the option of just skipping this class.
If you save big party nights for the weekend and avoid keg stands at company parties, you know you’ll be safe in your place at work.
Some might say that college imposes a certain type of childish social behaviour in people that’s hard to lose, but the boundaries established by your job usually ends that within a few years.
Good news everybody! All that time you spent on InsideTech, Facebook, and Twitter can actually help you get a job.
Finding new friends is associated with the college era because it’s the critical time where you decide on the type of person you wish to become and by extension, on the people you wish to surround yourself with. It’s no surprise that the most influential social network on the web, Facebook, was created on a major college campus by a geeky student wanting to expand his social circle.
The creation of this type of social media has led many to new jobs, relationships, and business opportunities. The bigger your social circle becomes online, the more attuned it becomes to your own sensibilities and job requirements. Nowadays, a “noob” gaming programmer can follow the major programmers online from Electronic Arts and know what they are reading, who their own friends are, and where they intend to take the industry in the next few years.
If you’re good enough, you can even challenge their own ideas through the immediate access these sites provide, such as email or PMs. For jobs, candidates can find out about internal opportunities in a workplace by tapping into the personal networks of extended connections.
This is similar to what happened when you pledged the fraternity, made your way up to the inner circle and started telling everyone what to do. You chose your circle and decided to set your influence.
While people in their 20s and 30s seem to take the most advantage of web networking, the open-source open-access relationships benefit everyone.
Of course, all this openness means you need to keep your social profiles relatively clean. Pictures of your engagement in sloppy, suspect activities is not a good first impression for potential employers.
Free time is precious. This is not something that we really learn until college graduation approaches and it’s definitely something we can really appreciate when we’re working 50-hour shifts at our day jobs.
Appreciating Vacation
In kindergarten, we went to school for a half a day. The next 12 grades held class 180 days a year, which left over half of every year where you weren’t in a classroom. Summers were months of long leisure marathons, interrupted only by school schedules with generous holiday breaks peppered throughout the calendar.
In college, these sprawling vacations began to disappear. Sure, you still had the benefits of summer, but as you got closer and closer to graduating that free time began to evaporate. Your free time was increasingly spent looking for a job to pay for that new apartment or your new car. By Junior and Senior year, everybody was strategically scrambling to fill his or her free time with internships.
When you graduated, even that tiny expanse of free time disappeared. Like gossamer blown to dust. Once you landed a job, you knew it was all over. There’s no spring break (that final parting salvo of childhood) and no three-week holiday breaks.
Vacation is precious now. So remember to live it up in style and with passion. Do you forget to do this? If so, don’t.