June 1st, 2010
Hello, B-School Graduation
First of all, I’m moving my blog. I oscillated quite a bit – right when I’m starting to get the right Google juice I give up? Yes. I have always been a huge fan of clean slates – how else are you supposed to know if you can build yourself back up again? So after graduation, my blog will be the much-less-witty http://amandapey.tumblr.com. See you 7 readers over there.
Right, graduation. The last one I experienced was 2005 from undergrad and I can’t say I am any more sure now about my future than I was then. I certainly had no job then (what employable skills does a 21 year-old History major have, exactly?) and spent the summer following graduation lying around my parent’s house wondering how I could take over the world while still watching 3-4 hours of daytime television. Not so successful. This is when I learned an extremely important life lesson: nothing productive EVER happens when you’re living with your parents. So I headed to Beijing to stir up some trouble.
After some time in Beijing figuring out how to do basic things like eat and buy train tickets, and a stint in Austin, TX I found myself at MIT in August 2008, ready to drink some more academic kool-aid.
Two years later, and I’m not dreading graduation like I was before. Maybe it took an extra two years of school (some of us are slower than others), but I am pretty excited to land in the startup world with no structured “career path.” Instead, this summer I’ll be living in a rental house near Stanford working on cool web stuff. It is going to be amazing, and it will be nice to get back to “survival mode,” academia was beginning to spoil me.
But there’s something about putting on a cap and gown – it’s one of the few American traditions that people still keep pretty sacred. As my third graduation, this may be the first one I am actually excited about. Not because I have any more of a plan than I did before, but because I have finally learned that uncertainty is something that should be cherished.