For the past few years, it's been hard to get through a day without having someone tell you how bad the economy is lately. Times are hard, the economy is cruel and competition is relentless. We hear it from parents, we feel it in the job market and we taste it in DDS' overpriced food. It's a message that we can't escape but it's also one of the reasons we picked Dartmouth. We all want a leg-up for when graduation rolls around, when the real world catches up with us.
But what happens when the Hanover bubble pops in the middle of a time of economic hardship? Do our expectations of advantage match up with reality? The Mirror caught up with two recent Dartmouth grads Chiara Klein '10 and Adam Frank '09 to see how their perspectives changed, and how they coped, upon entering the elusive "real world." Klein, who graduated with a theater major modified with psychology, always knew that she wanted to pursue the arts professionally. As a result, her post-graduate expectations weren't to land a six-figure salary right out of college.
"I just wanted to be able to support myself," Klein said.
Given the hardship faced by the vast majority of artists during the recession, however, "the goal is just to not be sleeping on someone's couch," she said.
So how did Klein manage to make her way while pursuing her passion during a recession? By being realistic.
"I don't pay my bills through theater," she said. "I never planned on that."
While Klein is a founder and artistic director of the MaineStage Shakespeare, a non-profit theater festival, she works in New York as both an SAT tutor and a Hebrew school teacher.
"In the [theater] industry, we talk about having your creative job and your survival job," she said. "Your survival job can be working at Starbucks, or it can be working for a highly lucrative company."
She said that Dartmouth has contributed to her access to the latter "survival job" option, putting her in a "different bracket" of opportunity than many of her fellow artists.
While Dartmouth grads do have a significant advantage over the general workforce, graduates don't always experience effortless transitions after college.
Frank, who majored in English, said he was surprised by the economic realities he faced after graduation.
"No one told us that it was going to be hard," he said. "No one told us we couldn't get a job until we didn't get jobs. People a little older than me got their dream jobs like they were supposed to, and then were fired when the crisis hit."
Frank said that, because the recession was relatively new when the Class of 2009 entered the workforce, they were financially sheltered for most of their Dartmouth experience. As a result, the "real world" was initially more difficult than he had anticipated
Frank faced much difficulty in his job search and initially accepted an internship in the artistic department of the Public Theater in New York City. Although he did receive a small stipend, he lived at home for the length of the internship because he couldn't afford rent, or even "enough food for the week," he said.
The Public's artistic department, which works on the organization's productions, did not have full-time jobs available after his internship, so Frank accepted an offer from the company's marketing group. Now working as a marketing associate in Brooklyn, he is starting to master the art of living on a budget in an expensive city.
"I can't say that there's one secret to making it work, but the longer you're out of college and you're an adult, you get better at it," he said. "It's a lot of little things that add up."
Klein also described herself as a beginner when it comes to spending wisely, but she has developed many strategies for keeping herself in line. By keeping her two different paychecks in separate accounts, she is able to allocate one for rent and savings and the other for all additional expenses. "I know exactly how much is going into and coming out of each one," Klein said. "I can see Oh, I'm clearly going out too much' or Maybe I should start couponing' or I need to save more.'"
She also emphasized the need for personal savings as early as right after graduation.
"It's nice to be able to support yourself, but it's nicer to know that you have something to show for it at the end of the day if you want to buy a house or go to grad school down the road," she said. "That's what people need in this economy."
Her perspective has also helped her avoid the traps of reckless spending and credit card debt, especially after the financial padding that Dartmouth and parental support seemed to offer.
"It was hard to wrap my brain around at first because I didn't have to worry about [credit] at Dartmouth," she said. "I carried one card around at school. I had my DA$H, and if it ran out, it went negative and I got a bill at home. It wasn't a big deal."
Frank recalled the transition from being a dependent college student in a small town to an independent adult in a big city as more natural.
"I loved Dartmouth while I was there, but you enjoy it to the fullest and then it's time to go," he said. "It might have been stressful learning to pay my own bills, but it never felt wrong or hard. It was just time for me to do that."
Frank contrasted his career path with those of his peers in the finance industry, which he described as having a clearer, "set path" to follow even before graduation.
"In any field that doesn't have a definite recruiting strategy, there isn't a definite way in," he said. "You have to make it up."
