Moving (back) into the dorms

Barbara

I love questions. I'm very inquisitive, and I love giving people information. But there is one question that really grinds my gears: ""What are you doing after graduation?"  I absolutely loathed that question last year, because it was a question I couldn't answer.

Now I'll admit I've caught myself asking that of some of my friends. And I need to stop. Because all it does is further the delusion that all graduates have a plan when they get their diploma – which is a total fallacy.

Actually, in talking with Caroline and Staci, I found that our answers to the dreaded question were the same: "I don't know."

For me, the after-graduation question mark brought me somewhere I hadn't been since my freshman year ended – the dorms.

As I waited to hear back from various potential employers, the days of my lease in Vermillion  were ticking away. I didn't want to move back home just to turn around and move again, so as May came to a close I packed all my worldly belongings into my mother's van and prepared to live in it  until I found a job.

Luckily for me, it just so happened that at the same time some of my newspaper friends were serving as mentors for the South Dakota Girls State  newspaper, the Sacajawea Scroll. And they were staying in the USD dorms . So I hopped on the mentor bandwagon and got a place to sleep that wasn't on wheels.

By the end of the week, I had accepted my internship with Wells Fargo and was ready to move to Sioux Falls.

"Living in the dorms." Far from the most ideal answer to the dreaded question, but sometimes you take what you can get.