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Cramming for the Big Chill You’ve finally graduated from college and vowed never to set foot in a classroom again. But after commencement exercises, it starts sinking in that it’s time to, indeed, commence adult life. You’re ready, but for what? Relax,
advises Stacy Kravetz M.A. ’92, author of Welcome to the Real World – You’ve Got an Education, Now Get a Life!, recently published by W.W. Norton and Co. “All you really need is the right guide,” she says.
Kravetz’s book is just that, giving grads the answers they need to get their post-college lives on track, from learning what kinds of jobs are out there to getting that first job, from renting an apartment to balancing a budget, from haggling with car dealers to paying back student loans. The vagaries of health insurance are explained, so readers can tell their HMOs from their PPOs.
A combination of wit and detailed research run through the guide. “I remember saying many times that I couldn’t wait to get out of college and into the real world,” Kravetz writes in the introduction. “I wanted to be paid real money and I wanted the Ikea chairs and Kenwood stereo system. The only problem was that the job market was tight, the Kenwood stereo was expensive, and my parents weren’t the roommates I had in mind.”
By book’s end she acknowledges that her contemporaries may have a case of information overload, but she advises them to enjoy the ride: “People who said youth was wasted on the young must not have had a very good time when they were young. This is your time.”
Kravetz guides readers to a view of the real world.
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KRAVETZ WAS INSPIRED to write Welcome to the Real World by her and others’ experience after earning a B.A. “When I looked for this kind of information I couldn’t find it,” she explains from the Los Angeles office of the Wall Street Journal, where the journalism grad now works. “I was frustrated because all the books I found treated the job search as something that could be done in a vacuum, without the worries of paying off credit cards, budgeting, dealing with housing and transportation needs, and coping with life’s financial emergencies.”
Although she set out to buy a book rather than write one, she decided a niche needed to be filled. “At least 50 friends I surveyed agreed,” she says. “When I described to them what I was going to do, most of them said, ‘I would have bought that book – in fact, I’d still buy that book.’ ”
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