Diploma, done. Now what?

IN TRANSITION #1

By Benjamin Toff, Globe Correspondent | July 31, 2005
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Editor's note: This is the first in an occasional series of reports about the strange time between getting a college diploma and entering ''real" life.

For about one year in my youth, I thought I wanted to design cars. My parents signed me up for a stack of car magazines, and I pored over them, sketching imaginative visions in a notebook beside my bed. Bouncing along in the school bus, I proudly told my friends about my destined profession -- ''automotive engineer" -- with the kind of certainty I have long since forgotten.

These days, two months after getting my college diploma, I'm shocked if I can make up my mind about what I want to eat for lunch.

While it's not yet keeping me up at night, the anxiety surrounding that first job out of college has begun to spark more than a few existential questions. I was warned about this feeling -- the sudden fear of life's shapelessness, the terror of having no structure. For years, my choices have been confined to options neatly organized within the pages of a course catalogue. Now there is no book. The freedom has left me spinning.

Friends have coped by taking jobs -- anything, as long as it pays -- and convincing themselves that it makes sense. It's the safe thing to do. And they're right. Many admit they will likely spend their 20s jumping from one miserable job to the next. It's a part of our futures, the part nobody tells you about in elementary school.

The other night, one friend accused me of being too picky. ''Everybody hates their first job; you just have to suck it up and take one," she said. Reclining in folding chairs she had bought at CVS for a couple of bucks, my friend and I shared a beer on the porch of her new Washington, D.C., apartment.

''I'm just worried you'll turn out unemployed, without direction, and still asking for money from your parents when you're 30. Just try doing something for a while. If you don't like it, do something else."

She's probably right to worry. After all, I'm about to join the masses of people without health insurance. But I'm reluctant to give up on 22 years of people telling me to ''do the thing you want to do in your heart" -- even if I tell myself it's temporary. Will I ever again be so free to drop everything and do the things I've always dreamed of? Hike the Appalachian Trail, work communications on a political campaign, travel to India, or that ever so romantic cliche, move to New York and try to survive as a writer? Will regret dog me the rest of my life because I took a job to pay rent rather than risking, rather than exploring?

Taking in the view of a dilapidated gas station across the street from where my friend and I sat in Washington, I watched people shuffling by on the sidewalk. They were an odd collection -- business people in suits, college-aged interns, some people who looked utterly up against it -- dragging their bodies, avoiding eye contact. I imagined each going home to his or her plain apartment, eating plain spaghetti, and falling asleep to ''The Tonight Show." There was something so lonely about the prospect of plainness.

I couldn't help but wonder what that kid who devoted hours to sketching out his fantasies would say to me now. I don't want to design cars anymore, but I wouldn't mind some of his certainty.

Benjamin Toff lives, for now, in Cambridge. He can be reached at btoff@boston.com.