The Recent Graduate Syndrome is hard to describe, but the symptoms are apparent. It is the feeling that you experience at the end of your senior year when you are wondering what to do what the rest of your life. Do I go to graduate school? Where will I work? Should I travel? You realize that the decision you make now will affect your career later…. so what do you do? I have personally experienced the Recent Graduate Syndrome mixed with the "20's Something Manifesto" (Please check out this book by Christine Hassler).

Here is the thing! Generation Y is experiencing a different world that our parents or grandparents have yet to master. We are trying to cope with student loans debt, society expectations, stereotypes, ever changing technology (which are expected to know right?). With the expectations others have for us and the one we have for ourselves can cause a bad case of Expectations Hangovers. Expectations Hangovers are formed when we confuses expectations with goals. Goals are things that we have strategies to achieve and do not happen over night or sometimes at all (something I call life). It is the uncertainty we feel when choosing a direction when there seems to be an infinite number of career options. It is the Expectation Hangover we experience when we just spent four to eight years training for a position that we dislike. Or maybe it's the feeling we have when start to work for a company to come to realize it is not the right fit for us.

Christine Hassler goes deep into the life of the 20's so that you can see you are not alone helps you figure out what skills are needed to create change and direction during the twenty-something years. The one thing I took away from this book is that you are not alone.

You are not the only graduate who is lost in the job market. You are not the only 20's Something still trying to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You are not the only person who still works a job that doesn't require a degree. Christine Hassler helps you see that it is not the end of the world and she talks strategy to help get to the place you want to be. She also gives great example from her own experiences as a 20's something.

I know the Recent Graduate Syndrome and Expectations hangovers all the well. You know that little thing called “what if scenarios,” where you ask yourself if I could backtrack and picked an alternative where would I be. For me, my whole family thinks this way so it was a bad habit to break. I had to come to the reality that “what if scenarios” are pointless I can’t go back and change my decisions. There is a difference between learning from bad decision making and dreaming about things you can’t control… I had to tell myself to snap out of it…

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