A Little Post College Advice From Reality

I suppose you all are wondering where I have been and why I just didn't keep up with this blog.  To be honest, I regret not keeping up with it.  I had a ton of fun while creating this blog and loved most of the feedback I received in return.  However, once I graduated, I ran head long into the world.

I left my job as a Wedding Coordinator (no you didn't miss a step, I was a Wedding Coordinator while making my way through school and writing this blog), and went backpacking across Europe and Australia for a year.  While I was away, I worked as a night cleaner cleaning hostels in London in exchange for free board, a Wedding Coordinator down in Australia, and a waitress in Australia.  When I got home I took the first job I could find which obviously was not the job I wanted, then got a sales job, then a marketing events coordinator job, and then finally a full blown marketing job. Yay world I have finally made it to the end goal!  I now know exactly what they mean when they say "Everyone hates you when you are 22."

So here is my advice to anyone who is getting ready to graduate college:

1) If all else fails, save all the pennies you can and go backpacking.  The people you meet are amazing, the food is incredible, and when everyone is waiting tables to make ends meet, you are at least waiting tables in another country.

While you are there contact temp agencies who hire in the field that you want to get into and/or have experience in.  I did not actually do this myself, but one of my best friends did right before I left and it worked out brilliantly for her.  She had fewer professional gaps in her resume, earned a higher paycheck than your typical backpacker, and still was gaining all the benefits of travel.  Keep a folder on you at all times with a copy of your resume (I also advise keeping this on a google doc so you can alter it and print it at any time), a couple official copies of your transcripts, and two signed letters of recommendations from previous employers or professors (don't give them away make a copy of them).  Keep the folder in a waterproof (i.e. ziploc) bag at the bottom of your backpack/suitcase.  Trust me looking like the ever ready bunny never hurts when it comes to finding a job.

Many cities offer free walking tours that I highly suggest you go on once you land.  It will help you find your barrings and find out what you actually want to do once you get to a city. AKA there is a lot more the Amsterdam than pot and a lot more to London than the Buckingham Palace.

Read the newspaper to find out when economies are going through hard times.  When they do buy your plane ticket in the failing countries currency and exchange some cash.  Br-exit isn't going to negatively affect your travels, but it will cheapen your airfare.  Just be sure that there isn't something actually wrong with the safety of the city.  A journalist being beheaded in Syria may drive down the plane ticket price, but you don't want it to end up costing you more than you bargained for later down the line.

Don't listen to people who tell you that you shouldn't travel.  Trust me there are plenty of people who told me about how I was about to become the new reality star of Hostel 4, but I to this day, do not personally know of anyone who was brutally murdered while staying in a Hostel.  I do know of two boys who drowned in a lake (which I do reflect on pretty regularly) and I do know of one boy who was rufied in a bar and woke up in a hospital, but both of those things actually happened at home for them.

2) If you get a job straight out of school negotiate as much time to travel before you start as you possibly can.  Whether it is a week or a month or even three months, it is well worth it!

3) When you first start applying for jobs, apply to as many as you can!  Alternatively, if you had an internship which is offering you a full time position use this as a starting point.  Once you have one job, then apply only to jobs that interest you and use the salary from the one you have to negotiate a higher salary somewhere else.

4) Don't expect to jump out of college and have your life all put together for you.  A lot more people end up living with their parents at some point although the tend to not want to admit to it.  Get the cheapest apartment you can find and find free furniture when ever you can.  I am currently repainting a once white bookshelf into a very nice black with grey trim.  What probably should have cost me $500 in solid bookshelf that goes with my decor is actually only costing me about $50 in paint and brushes ($30 if I had saved my last set of paint brushes).

5) Never stop learning.  Go to conferences in your field and get book recommendations from speakers.  Actually read the books.  This will expand your horizons, keep you fresh, and give you something to talk about at interviews/awkward dinner parties.  Also go to lectures in your are that interest you and read books on topics you like.

6) If you find you are dating someone and you do not feel like you are a better person with them (which generally goes hand in hand with if you are generally happy with them) leave.  I have far to many friends in unhappy relationships to even site examples on this one.  However, you aren't doing anyone any favors by staying in what can be sometimes be described as miserable relationship.  It doesn't matter if you have been with them for years, that may just mean that you have been with them one year too long.  People grow and change, break ups aren't bad they are a part of life.  There are plenty of people out there and one day you too will stumble across someone who makes you happy to wake up in the morning and be alive with them.

7) Reconnect every once in a while with old friends, old coworkers, and old boyfriends.  Sure things may not have worked out as you had once hoped, but these people have grown just as you have and the connection you had with them will never fully go away.  Especially during the hard times, we tend to avoid people.  However, going to one of my best friend from school's art opening right after I had lost my job was better than any therapy I could have asked for.

8) Be honest about your past with yourself and other people in your life.  Everyone has parts of their past they aren't proud of, but a lot of people have trouble opening up about it.  When you learn from your less than proud moments, you grow.  Sharing your growth from a bad time in your life allows people to see your growth beyond it, connect more deeply with people who are trying to grow from their past, and allows them to grow from your experiences. That being said, you must actually grow first and the only way to do that is to be honest with yourself.

9)  Know what job you want to have two jobs away from where you currently are.  A lot of people get complacent in their current job because they don't know what they want to do moving forward and they don't know how to get there.  If you know where you want to go next and where you want to go after that, you will have random evenings of inspiration where you will talk to a colleague, pick up a book, or search through the google machine to figure out how to get where you want to go.

10) There is always hope around the corner. If you aren't dead, there is still life yet.  Keep going after what you want even if life knocks you down a bit!  There is nothing that you can't do.

Have a beautiful life!
-Reality

If I Go Alone, The Cannibals will Eat Me Part II

*If you haven't read http://girlworldvsreality.blogspot.com/2012/03/if-i-go-alone-cannibals-will-eat-me.html read first*

          So cool, last time we all realized that when traveling, that no matter where we are or where we go, we live in a world made up of human beings with feelings and emotions.  Sure there are a few bad eggs here and there, but in general people will pick up on your signals and help you out, you just have to be willing to make those first moves towards saying no.  Of course, no one is going to make a movie about the girl who got away, only the girl who fell for the trap.

But wait what about Hostel?  People had asked you about that one two, and well, those guys were taken right out of their beds.  They weren’t even travelling alone. They were in a group of GUYS!!! I’m a girl all alone! If a guy falls for that, how am I supposed to be on my A game enough to not have that happen to me without using a private investigator?   Well first of all let’s remind ourselves that it just a movie.  While some hostels can be sketchy, most of them aren’t secretly operating as a way to collect people to be tortured and if they are they are probably being shut down by local authorities. 

In our modern age, booking websites provide endless supplies of feedback on hostels so you can actually feel them out before you book.  I mean if hotels and hostels are operating under a false front in order to collect people to enslave, and you happen to book there even after researching it and getting a pretty good vibe, I’m sorry but that is called really bad luck.  Of course, so is having a pedophile move in across the street when you were six years old and you hadn’t even left the house at that point.  Sadly, I can’t sit here and say that bad things don’t happen in the world, because they happen everywhere.  However, I can say that they happen everywhere and you are pretty much as safe abroad as you are at home. 

Sure, stories of fatal adventures pop up in our newspapers and create a panic against travel.  However, over 32 million single American women traveled in 2010, and made up 65% of people going on cultural adventure tours.  In fact in the past 6 years the single woman travel business has grown by 230%.  If all of them were being raped, murdered, and kidnapped abroad, not only would this number no longer be existent, but those news stories wouldn’t be news stories at all it would just be what happened when you are stupid enough to leave your front porch.  Think about it how many car crashes make the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  In all my time of reading that particular paper I have seen none.  However, I have seen enough plane crashes to make me never want to look at a plane again.  Funny thing is, you are 12 times more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash.

People are funny that way, when I first decided to Virginia Tech, just after the April 16^th shootings, people constantly said “Don’t get shot.”  I lived less than five miles from Baltimore City (and actually went to school in the city) and moving was to a place where in the past 100 years there were two incidents of people getting shot, one in the early 1900’s and the other on April 16^th 2007.  Blacksburg is still one of the safest places in America and Baltimore is one of the most dangerous, but because every petty crime is a shock in Blacksburg, it becomes a big story which is scary and shocking to those on the outside.

            So, just remember to travel safe girls and live smart.

Sources:

http://gutsytraveler.com/2010/12/31/women-travel-statistics-the-latest/ http://www.hostelworld.com/blog/solo-female-travel-nine-myths-and-one-truth/155970http://www.airtravelsurvival.com/pages/plane-crash-statistics.htm

If I Go Alone, the Cannibals Will Eat Me

            “Wow! You’re doing all this Alone?”  She said flipping through my calendar for the next year, full of plane flights and hostel bookings.

            “Yep! I’m so excited!  I mean not everything is in place yet I mean you can see there are a few gaps here where I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, but I have a few months still.”  I beamed showing off my life dream planned out, booked, and ready to be achieved.

            “Oh girl, you’re gonna die in human trafficking or something!” My friend laughed at me.
            “Yeah, but it will totally be worth it.”  I smiled.

            “Everyone has to die somehow; I guess it just wouldn’t be my choice of how I want to go.”  She said shaking her head.

            While she was laughing, I knew a part of her was serious.  My dream of going off and traveling was her nightmare.  Sure she wanted to go cool places, and do fun things, and take pictures in front of the Eiffel tower, but she wanted to it all from the safety and security of a travel group full of people she knew and trusted.

            She isn’t the only one who is shocked to hear of my after college plans, most of the time when I told people, although their said it was cool and they were jealous, their faces were afraid.  At some point they would work in “be sure to see Taken and Hostel before you go and be safe!” somewhere into the conversation.  The funny thing is I wasn’t going anywhere too intense; I was backpacking across Europe and Australia.  These weren’t war-torn countries where bullets would be flying down the streets on a daily basis.  They were just normal countries which held no more threating than staying at home.  Whenever the movies Taken and Hostel are brought up, I like to ask them if they have ever seen Glass House or Prom Night plenty of us girls have seen those and we still went to high school and  to prom and to babysit our parent’s friends children when we still weren’t even legal adults yet.

I admit, taken is probably the most realistic of all these movies as for something that could actually happen to a girl abroad, but lucky for us, they kept it honest, and you can see even in that movie the exact moment where Kim and Amanda make their fatal mistake.  No, it wasn’t in decided to stay in Paris alone, nor was it when they blared the music too loud for their neighbors to hear them scream.  Their fatal moment came at the very beginning where they met the seemingly harmless Peter in the airport.  No, it wasn’t the actual meeting of the boy that did them in, it was the way in which they met him.  They never asked him about his own life.  They let him question them without questioning what he told them at all.  They didn’t ask him where he was coming from, where he was going, why he was hanging out in an airport, where his bags were, or any evidence for his answers.  They gave out all their own personal details.  If they had asked for something or anything at all, they probably would have felt that creepy vibe people give off when their stories don’t add up and probably would have gotten in the Taxi alone and continued on their adventure touring the concerts of Europe.  Oh look fatal mistake number 2 they shared a Taxi with a guy and were dropped off first at the exact spot where they were staying.  Sharing a ride with someone you don’t know should make your nervous bells go off. 

Really girls you couldn’t have splurged for the extra five bucks to not split the cab fare, those girls were just too poor? Of course the bus wasn’t an option, because there isn’t a single bus that goes into Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport!  Besides, how could they be rude to their new friend they just made in a city where they knew no one?  Ok so split the cab girls, but don’t let his French “politeness” fool you, tell him that you want to see the city a bit and would prefer HE be dropped off first, or be dropped off a couple blocks away, walking a bit won’t kill you, but he could.  In the grand scheme of things, five bucks really isn’t all that much, every airport I have ever been too, including the Roanoke airport, where you get the awesome experience of walking out onto the tarmac every time, has buses going to just about every place you could want to go, and being rude is always ok if your safety is in question people are everywhere losing out on one guy who couldn’t respect your safety is not going to matter in about fifteen minutes.  I can pretty much guarantee that you will never look back and think “hmmm, why was I so rude to that prick who wanted to rape me in the middle of the night?”  You’re just not!  There are plenty of people in this world, most of whom aren’t sketchy, so go ahead and feel people out and drop the ones that raise some red flags for you.

My friend Sandy actually had some guys try to pick her up in a similar way, she had gone to Las Vegas alone while visiting the U.S. from Australia, but was flying in from Orlando.  She was waiting at the taxi line when two guys came up to her and said “Hey mate, you Aussie?”

“Yep” She replied smiling. 

“So are we!  Nice to see a people from home on the other side of the world; wanna come out with us later tonight.”

“No, I’m meeting up with my boyfriend.”  She countered.  She could already hear flaws in their accent, and just had an off feeling about them.  She knew perfectly well that no boyfriend was going to meet her here.  She would venture the sites and shows alone. 

“We should split a cab, I mean Vegas is all in the same direction.”  The boys said to her, making no offer to include her boyfriend in their “awesome” adventures.  She laughed turning away to approach the cab caller when suddenly another guy grabbed.

“Take my cab!” The stranger said, “Those guys aren’t from your country and they aren’t safe.  You need to keep a sharp eye out here.”

“Thank you so much and believe me I knew, they weren’t Australian on the plane” She winked getting into the cab thankful to the kind stranger.

This is how that scene from Taken would actually go down if you are smart about it.  First of all, Sandy let her conversation and body language signal to others that she did not know these guys.  She also wasn’t about to step foot in the same cab as them or let them put her in an uncomfortable situation.  Lucky for her, someone picked up on her signals and pulled her out before she had to make a stand on her own.