I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte on December 19th of 2009. I graduated Magna Cum Laude (lat. trans.: Totally Badass) with a 3.81 GPA, membership in several well-known honor societies, a B.A. in anthropology, and a minor in art history. I had worked hard and it had paid off. My entire family is college educated and walking across that questionably constructed stage in the middle of the Halton Arena in funereal robes was more than anything a coming of age rite signifying that I had at long last joined their adult ranks. It is the single proudest moment of my life thus far. I truly believed that finally, this was it, the beginning of my life! I had all that school fuss out of the way. Soon I would bravely be forging ahead in the real world to pursue my dream of becoming a world-renowned archaeologist (with her own History Channel show nonetheless).
Four months later I found myself back in swampy tidewater Virginia, sitting in a Panera Bread across from a friend, simultaneously trying to wolf down a Cuban Chicken Panini and confess my deepest heartfelt anxieties that I was already a failure. Instead of digging up projectile points of a Late Woodland Period site or studying the change in burial patterns throughout the Bronze Age of Greece—I am living at home with my parents, working 9 to 5 for the nation’s favorite hardware-store-on-steroids-and-a-penchant-for-fluorescent-orange, with nothing to do on a Friday night, longing for the friends and good times that I left 342 miles to the south.
Post-graduate life is not exactly what I had expected. I wasn’t naïve enough to assume that once I graduated I would be offered a job in the field or a graduate school scholarship on a gold platter, but neither had I expected the journey to be quite so torturous. Between applying to graduate programs, applying for jobs, being accepted and rejected from both, deciding which to choose, interviews, searching for scholarships, searching for a place to live, coming up with a budget… I’m not sure how many people realize just how hard the process can be, and how easy it is to lose heart. I’m not expecting many people to read this, mostly I am doing it for myself, as if somehow publicly chronicling the odyssey will make me more accountable for the need to achieve it rather than settling for something less. But for those who do stumble across goldenmarshalltown.blogspot.com, especially those who are about to leave the safe haven of the undergraduate world or find themselves in a similar position, I hope it will show that they’re not alone and help prepare them for the leap.
