What the First Year After College Is Really Like
For many, a diploma from the right school still seems like the ticket to a successful life. The reality, as Caroline Kitchener describes in her new book, Post Grad, is much more complicated. After graduating with a coveted Princeton University undergraduate degree in 2014, Kitchener followed four of her peers during their tumultuous postgrad years. These young women took their Ivy League credentials in four distinct directions after passing through the historic gate on Nassau Street.
Denise, the daughter of Cameroonian immigrants, struggles with imposter syndrome as she prepares her medical school applications. Alex navigates her first relationship with a woman and a tense relationship with her older brother-turned-business-partner, all while dealing with the dizzying consequences of her father finding out about her sexuality. Michelle enjoys a wonderfully supportive relationship with her parents, who pay her way through a master's in jazz vocals at a competitive music conservatory, where she grapples with her identity as a singer and as a romantic partner. Olivia's path is the least linear. Refusing money from her wealthy family in Malaysia, she couch-surfs and apartment-hops her way through Brooklyn by night and films her documentary in Manhattan by day when not traveling in a "sugar daddy's" private jet. It is Caroline herself who captures their stories and offers her own with honesty and vulnerability. These women defiantly contradict stereotypes, and Caroline does not reduce them to tokens. Post Grad reveals the complicated, painful, funny, messy, sometimes shocking, and entirely human journeys of young women with extraordinary educations.
I read Post Grad with particular interest, because Caroline was my student when I was on faculty at Princeton University. To discover a former student has written a text rooted in the stories of young women navigating the complicated social, political, and economic worlds they discover not long after leaving my classroom was fascinating-affording me a glimpse into their lives I am rarely granted. The creativity and courage I discovered at the foundation of these stories convinced me all my graduating senior advisees need a copy. Inspired by that idea, I asked one of my current students, Wake Forest University senior Lauren Barber, who has spent the year studying as an ELLE.com scholar, to sit down with Caroline to talk about Post Grad, the process of writing, and what she learned about herself and her generation in the process. -Melissa Harris Perry
Lauren: As a senior about to graduate from college I can see myself in all the women you write about in 'Post Grad.' How did you choose to follow these four?
Caroline: This book was going to make these women very vulnerable, and I realized I needed to choose people who I trusted and who trusted me enough to truly let me into their lives. It is amazing how much access they gave me over the course of the year I followed them.
Given the sensitive nature of the material, how did you decide what to include and what to omit?
It was a delicate balance. I wanted to present the real, honest story, and there are parts they were not entirely comfortable having out in the world. We had to work together to strike a balance.
In the epilogue, you reveal you initially did not plan to include your own story in the book. Why did you decide to share?
During the year I was following and writing about these four women, they were opening up to me, and I realized much of what they were experiencing paralleled my own life at that time. It seemed unfair to ask them to put their stories into this book while withholding my own. It was a revelation to encounter the reality that 'we are all part of the same story.' I realized if I was going to ask them to make themselves publicly vulnerable, I had to do the same.
I think that is an important perspective. Many people judge our generation as self-absorbed, the "selfie generation," and might perceive your decision to include an autobiographical thread as egotistical, but it is quite courageous. For example, I appreciate your choice to be honest about your mental health struggles during the year following graduation. The book de-stigmatizes the need to seek help, which can be a real challenge-especially at elite schools like Princeton where there's a need to maintain a veneer of perfection. What is the 'Princeton ladder mentality' you write about in the book?
It is a kind of tunnel vision where all people can think is: I need to do this thing, and this thing, and this thing, to be more and more and more successful. You come out of the gate, [and] there is so much pressure for you to succeed in a visible way. If your success is not immediately visible, many people feel like failures. This can generate stress and mental health issues. I sought help for the first time during my junior year at Princeton. There was a three-week wait for an appointment. Many of us were seeking help, but we didn't want to talk about it.
The book also reveals that another major stress after college is the need to find community.
That was the No. 1 struggle for all of us: going from college, where you have the most wonderful structured community all around you all the time, to having none. The central question of our lives was, How am I going to create that for myself when my entire life I've had other people doing that for me, because I've been at school?
And without this community, it seems everyone was left asking, 'Who am I?'
Yes, especially for those of us who, as educated women, want to be independent, but also want a partner. Nearly everyone was struggling with this. Remember, we were undergraduates when Susan Patton, the mother to two of our male classmates, wrote an open letter in our school paper clearly arguing that we, as women, should spend more of our time in college cultivating our opportunities for romantic partnership.
Finding that balance was something we all struggled with. Graduation is an accomplishment but it is also the loss of a community, and we wanted someone to make us feel safe and comfortable. It is not shameful to rely on others and to want a relationship.
This issue may have been more complicated for the women in your book who are not exclusively in romantic relationships with men.
Absolutely. Over the course of the book, Alex's parents find out she is a lesbian, and she has her first serious relationship with a woman. Alex's story, I think, is really interesting because she grew up in a tiny town in rural Arkansas. Her father is a Baptist minister, and she grew up listening to her father say things like, 'AIDS is a good thing, because it wipes out all the gays,' while knowing she was gay. That was absolutely terrifying. She struggles with how to keep her family and also begin this new and meaningful relationship.
Ultimately, what was the most important lesson you learned in your first year after college?
Not to be ashamed of relying on other people. In college we learned independence was something to strive for and dependence was something to absolutely avoid. There is something wonderful about building relationships that are strong enough that you feel comfortable relying on them. I think there's a strength in that. If I could do my first year out of college again I would remind myself of that a lot. There's no shame in relying on other people.
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