Everything I Need to Know I Learned After College

College is supposed to be a learning experience. For most people, it’s the first time away from home. It’s the first time you have to take responsibility for what you do and don’t do and also deal with the consequences of your decisions. It’s expected that we will all make some mistakes along the way, but it’s up to us to learn from them. The funny thing about learning from our mistakes is that we don’t learn the lessons until after it’s too late, which is why everything I need to know I learned after college.

1. Grades don’t matter.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in the long run, your college grades don’t matter. Unless you’re applying for grad school, law school, med school, etc., then grades really won’t be that important. While some employers may check your GPA for entry level jobs, take a look at the resume of anyone who has been working for a few years, and you’ll see no sign of a GPA. What employers will be looking for is real world experience, which is why internships are great for college students.

2. Relationships do matter.

If there’s one thing they forget to teach you in college, it’s how important it is to build good relationships. While it’s not expected that you’ll get along with every person that you meet, you should definitely make an effort to build solid friendships with the people you do get along with. Most of the students in my graduate program end up working in a specific industry, and I found out that some of the recruiters ask recent hires from our school about potential candidates before making hiring decisions.

3. Don’t spend leftover loan money.

Many college students end up with leftover student loan money at the end of each semester, including myself. Now here’s some advice that’s a lot easier said than done. You don’t have to spend it. In fact, you can use the leftover money to pay back part of your existing student loans. By paying back part of your student loans early, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of money in the long run.

4. Don’t judge others.

Remember the guy that was totally smashed at the party or the girl who was so drunk she fell down the stairs? Well, after college I learned that these people end up being your coworkers, supervisors, and bosses. Some of them will even become doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. While I think it’s human nature to judge, sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we all have flaws, and sometimes we just have to learn how to accept them.

5. Learn how to judge yourself.

From kindergarten through college, we spend our lives getting judged by others in the form of grades. Some people struggle with the fact that this concept of grades doesn’t exist in the real world. Instead, it’s replaced by an entirely new beast — the performance review. While you may still get graded in your performance review, a performance review is really an opportunity to sell yourself.

At one of my internships, my supervisor handed me the performance review sheet and told me to fill it out myself. While I didn’t enjoy it at the time, it was a great learning experience because I was able to compare my own perception of myself with my supervisor’s perception of me. When we didn’t agree on something, he asked me to explain why. This helped me identify what areas I needed to work on so that I would be able to promote myself even better in the future.

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