Working in the Real World
Updated:11:34 AM ET September 11, 2005
By Anjori Sinha

May 14th 2005. Hundreds of Virginia Tech engineering students were relieved of the endless, sleepless nights of homework, projects, studying, and of course lets not forget the partying. No matter what the reason, most of us stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to take advantage of every minute of our short twenty-four hour day. Many would express the need to have more hours, more time, to do what was needed or wanted.

But despite the excitement of leaving the pains of engineering, there is some uncertainty of what follows. Maybe its not really the uncertainty of what follows, rather of how things in life will fall together. Imagine an enormous jigsaw puzzle.

The pieces of my past twenty-one years are already in place. The big picture of what the rest of the puzzle is supposed to look like is also virtually present. But the problem comes in finding the right pieces to fit properly and ensuring that what we see in the end is more pleasant than not.

The job, almost seems like a toy for big kids, for those who have just graduated from college. But like every toy, it may also become, after awhile, old and mundane. For now though, the excitement of such a nice new toy overwhelms all other emotions. In a matter of months life went from working, technically, more than forty hours a week for classes to having nothing to do but sleep and eat, to the grueling times of waking up early in the morning and working eight hours a day, five days a week.

August 1, 2005 I received my toy, later than some, earlier than others. The feeling was unexplainable; there was a little fear, lots of excitement, and a bit of sadness. It took a week to break into my new shoes, whose footprints would be evident in every corner of my jigsaw puzzle. The weekend after stepping into the real world was in itself a refreshingly new experience. Jenn and I went back to the place that we, along with others, wanted to get away from in such a hurry back in May. A visit back to a place we used to call home for the past four years aroused a bit of sadness inside, with the realization that I will never live here again.

The transition has been a bit more difficult than expected but the reasons for that has been on a more personal level. Age difference between co-workers has been an interesting change. Everyone is filling in different levels of their own puzzles, but we all come together to create that one piece of the puzzle that is common among everyone. And with this similarity, we, the newcomers, become lost in the hustle and bustle with the rest of the world. ~*~