Just to prove my point that my circle of friends is hanging out and hangin on to one another more than ever before – I actually got out my Blackberry and took pictures of all of us this weekend.  Anyone who knows me would tell you that for me to pull out a camera is nothing but strange.  I just don’t do that.  And it’s not like I consciously thought, “I need to take a picture of this to always remember my college friends.”  I just started snapping photos without much thought.  It was instinctive, natural and contradictory to my usual behavior, which proves this is a transitional period in my life and how I behave now isn’t necessarily my normal self – some would say it should be though.  Maybe, I’m the only one thinking that, but I doubt it.

OK, I digress. So, our hangout this weekend included going to the grocery store, buying 3 mammoth lobsters and figuring out how to cook them.  As college students with limited cookware and limited money to buy new cookware, trying to get at the lobster meat is basically what made the night.  It was a ton of fun!  I’m not a guy who cooks for myself by any means, but I honestly think having a bunch of friends over, hanging out in the kitchen and then stuffing our faces with whatever comes out of the oven beats screaming over each other at some noisy bar.  Actually, this weekend we did a little of both.  After cooking the lobsters and figuring out how to eat them with limited proper seafood utensils, we headed to the bars.

I’m not going to give you details on what I did Saturday night.  This is not that kind of blog.  I’m simply making the point that as we begin the final weeks before our transition in to the “real world,” my friends and I are coming together more than we did before to do activities we never did before.  I’ve even noticed that my little group of friends is less accepting than they use to be of letting new people in to the group, but that subject is another blog post for another week.  This week it was lobsters; I wonder what other ideas we’ll think up to make lasting memories of college life?  I’ll have the camera ready whatever we decide to do.

n undergraduate, and I’m taking this tiny home on the world wide web as my opportunity to freely discuss this stage in my life, chronicling the simultaneously frightening and exciting transition from school to the “real world.”

The leap from High School to college is a huge deal!  Parents go with their kids on college tours and ask question after question about campus security:  how many blue lights, do the doors lock, what kind of food do you sell, are there locks or card swipes on the door?  And colleges do pretty well ensuring parents’ every last security needs are met. These are all great things; I have no gripe over those blue lights on campus.  My point is that the leap to college is significant, but not all that significant because as eighteen-year-olds we’re still coddled in college like nursery school kids.  People fail to talk about the transition from college, especially undergraduate education, to the working world.  That’s real change and that’s where I am at in life now.  Let me give you a little bio on myself.  I’m from PA and came out to the midwest to the Missouri School of Journalism to become a television news reporter.  I neurotically track politics and news, so following it as a career was too easy a decision.  This is it, my final semester as an undergraduate and it’s difficult to believe in a few months an employer will hand me a wage and benefits – if I’m so fortunate – and trust me to produce something for him.  What an awkward transition it is to go from academia to the office, or in my case – the newsroom.  As students we go from writing papers and reading novels, which is independent and isolated study, to collaborating with our colleagues in the office or making a television show in my case.  Now, I’m not saying my education didn’t prepare me at all for the working world; I’ve had wonderful internships and excellent hands-on work experience as a student, but what I believe is one of the least discussed transitions in life, life after college, is fast approaching and people rarely talk about it, at least not as much as they worry about campus security during the more popular transition to college.  Adults, not young adults like me and my peers, but established people just slap us soon-to-graduate students on the back and say, “So, ya ready for the real world?”  And that question is always followed up with a smirk and a laugh.  Always.

So now it’s January 28, and in 4 months this dream world of college ends and I’m released into this real world that adults love teasing us about.  This blog will share the work, the studying, last-minute information cramming, resume critiquing and preparation I’ll go through before entering the real world.  I can only hope that once I enter the real world, which I assume happens once the tassel moves to the other side of the mortar board, I’ll have a better understanding of why those old people would always smirk and laugh when they say, “Welcome to the real world.”

I end every last day of the semester feeling smarter and more well-rounded than the first day of that semester, but with this being my last semester, possibly my last semester ever in the classroom, I feel especially pressured to milk everything I can from college.  This blog tracks that milking and the “real world” that’ll emerge from the other side.