In the late winter/early spring of each academic year, Residential Life begins the hiring process for the new resident assistant staff for the following year. Since I sit on the selection committee, I’ve been in and out of the office for the past two weeks or so, interviewing the current candidates. It’s a very bittersweet time; I know a lot of the candidates and I’m proud of them for getting to the individual interview (there are stages in the process where people get cut) and I think a lot of them are going to do very well. What’s sad though is that I’m helping to pick out people to replace me and many of my friends when we leave this May.
Graduation for college students is a lot scarier than high school graduation. When I graduated high school, not very much seemed to change for me. I moved around so much growing up that going to a university several states away was easy. I adjusted quickly and made new friends easily. I was studying something I was already interested in, now I was just doing it for credit. I’m the oldest of four boys so sharing a room wasn’t much a change either since I’ve been doing it since I was about four years old. I definitely enjoyed the freedom without my parents, but at the same time, I wasn’t going crazy like many college students and getting hammered every night. In fact, most of my nights were spent watching movies and having midnight trips to the beach and Taco Bell.
High school graduation was absolutely easy. Everything was still mapped out. Now there’s this huge gaping void in front of me and it gets closer every day. The faculty in the forensic science department have been great with giving me advice on what to do. With the current economy, job searching is just plain awful and I’m not interested in graduate school right now; in fact, it’s my back-up plan. And even while I’m excited to move on and become a “real grown-up”, I’m still plenty scared of it. I’ve been a student for sixteen years now, a clear majority of my life, and I’m still a little nervous that somewhere along the way I’m going to fall flat on my face. We’ll see.
On the bright side, I applied for an entry level position as a crime laboratory analyst down south. The job is low enough that I can pick the area I want to concentrate in, ranging from criminalistics to forensic DNA identification to inputting and analyzing samples in CODIS. I got a message a day or so ago saying that my application was received and being checked for qualifications. Today, I got a notification that my application was actually put on the Eligible List. So, who knows, I might have an interview in a few days. Fingers crossed!
