Guest UserSeptember 21, 2020

Post-graduation story or how to deal with rejection?

Guest UserSeptember 21, 2020

This article is written by two best friends. Anano and Nino. We are both from Tbilisi, Georgia, but we’ve spent the past 4 years studying in Lithuania.

June 15th ( it doesn’t REALLY matter, not that other days in June were any different), 2020.

Klaipeda (this does matter), Lithuania.

We’ve just graduated and we’re desperately looking for a job in Vilnius. LinkedIn has become our most used social media app, which I think at the age of 22 isn’t very healthy. At this point, we have reached out to 90% of HRs in Lithuania. This isn’t an exaggeration.

Our days all look more or less the same. We wake up early in the morning, I go for a run, Nino starts scrolling LinkedIn right away. When I come back, she goes for a run and then I devote my time to LinkedIn. We switch roles. So on the 15th of June, we did our workouts, had soy-vanilla-oatmeal breakfast, and sent out another set of, what will probably be unanswered applications. As we ran our crazy important errands the clock struck 3 pm. Now, we’re stuck. We have absolutely nothing to do. We need to somehow kill time before midnight - our bedtime. We can take the usual route - daydream about scoring an interview, realize we’re wasting our time daydreaming, and then complain about things not moving forward (because complaining is so healthy).

You might ask, why the heck are these girls so stressed about getting a job a month after graduation? Lots of recent graduates choose not to work in the summer because technically it’s the last summer, last chance to “have fun.” Some even take a whole year off. We know and we think it’s cool. Why are we so stressed then?

Studying abroad is a funny thing. Everyone, yourself included, thinks that you become automatically so much more qualified in every aspect of life. You become more cultured, fluent in certain languages, get “better” education, and build an international network. It is kinda true though. But you know what else is also true? Huge social pressure. Parents, friends, relatives, acquaintances, anyone else we didn’t mention bombard you with questions like “ So are you staying or coming back home?” “ Did you get a job yet?” “You are not going to settle for an average job, are you? “ “ You studied abroad, don’t forget your worth”.

People set these highest expectations for you because you are supposedly this amazingly gifted young adult with great potential. This kind of “support” should be encouraging and we know that it’s coming from a good place, but at the end of the day, we’re still demotivated. Why’s that?

Because family and friends have unrealistic standards. We have unrealistic standards. And employers have unrealistic standards. And while we are all on different pages, standard wise, the social clock keeps ticking (or is it just in our heads?).

By 7 pm we were at our favorite coffee spot. The one we were at yesterday, and we will be tomorrow.

Nino: I don’t know, sometimes I feel like there’s nobody on the other side. At least, send “No, we don’t want you.” Rejection email takes like what? Two minutes to write?

Anano: Yeah, I mean I understand… But anyway, this would be so much easier if we were EU citizens and corona hadn’t happened.

Nino: You know, paperwork scares them...

Anano: Paperwork that we have to deal with, not them….. Sometimes I feel like we’re just stuck.

Nino: We feel stuck because we are stuck. Are we doing anything wrong? There’s got to be other ways...

However, we didn’t know what these other ways were. One thing was clear, our current approach didn’t yield the desired results.

It sounded so simple, if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you will keep getting the same results. So we had to change our actions but we didn’t have the slightest idea how to. Both of us had been living abroad, independently for four years. We’d lived in almost as many countries as there are semesters in college and we viewed ourselves as 20-something kids that knew best and didn’t need any help. But it was so wrong. At that time, what we really needed was some guidance.

With these thoughts in mind, June slipped by.

At this point, sending applications was just another habit of ours that we engaged in with not much thought, energy, and pleasure. But, hold on, we don’t wanna be all negative. We most certainly had some highs. But nothing that could restructure our downward slope.

July was coming to an end, and it dawned on us that we had only 26 days until our Temporary Residence Permit expired. So we needed to hurry. Vilnius seemed like a place to go. It is full of restaurants, galleries, clubs, opportunities, people, life. This sounds SO exciting until it doesn’t. Because no matter how cool a city is, if you don’t have much to do, it suddenly loses its cool.

Making bold decisions was never our thing, we didn’t know how to make the first step either when approaching guys or companies. But we decided to experiment because we would rather try than give up and then mourn over all the brunch and breakfast places that we wanted to go to but couldn’t afford.

So what did we do?

Halfway through this article, we realized that we didn’t really do anything extraordinary or risky. We just sent out one email. One vulnerable email with no CV attached, without much formality. We were so desperate, we let our personality show and we wrote what we felt. This one email changed the entire course of action and got us a side gig at this magazine. It can’t pay us rent now but it’s an experience that eventually will. We came to realize that the power of the universe is in simplicity. We often accept stagnation because we think something larger than life should happen for a change to occur. Yes, there needs to be outside pressure that forces you to get imaginative and create ways you haven’t considered before or were too afraid to take. You need to experience the uneasiness of breaking down the comfort barrier, but you don’t have to go big. Send an email.

And we will too because there still is 10% of HRs in Lithuania who don’t know our names.

We realize that being in Georgia now makes the job-hunting a whole lot more difficult but let’s keep in touch. Maybe you have a job for us?