Livin the Alum Nathan Cheng. Cultural Awareness Chair ‘09-’10. Formal Scene Coord. ‘09-’10
It’s been a solid 5 months now since I set foot off campus for the last time as a student, and set foot right into the hustle and bustle of the real world. It’s a world completely different from that of a student: it’s a world of no winter breaks, 8 to 5 work days, lack of midterms and finals, and going to sleep before—wait for it—midnight. While that may seem completely unfathomable to you right now as you slog your way through another semester of living in UGL/Grainger insert study area of your choice, allow me to give you a sense of what the post-student life (yes, I have a life) is like.
What’s your life like now? On weekdays, it’s a pretty simple routine. I drag my sleepy butt out of bed at the crack of dawn, go to work for 8-9 hours, work out/bum around, and go to sleep. Usually work is draining enough that you might not have the energy to really do much else at night, depending on your profession. Weekends become all the more valuable because of it.
What do you do at work all day? I stare at a screen all day and watch my bank account inflate.
Well that was descriptive. Seriously, what do you do at work all day? I’m a programmer at Bank of America. I code in Java and work on improving software that traders use to make tons of cash. It’s a pretty interesting and challenging job because I’m basically working in both Computer Science and Finance fields, neither of which was my original major (Electrical Engineering).
What do you miss most about college? I think the one thing I miss most about college is the people. Apart from the fact that the majority of my friends are still in college or people I met in college, the college setting is also one where social situations are readily available, even if it’s something as simple as “studying” in a group for completely unrelated classes in ISR until the sun rises. In the work place, unless you consciously set up events and hangouts, social situations are harder to come by. You can’t simply stroll down the street in downtown Chicago and run into a bunch of friends heading to class, or just bum around in Union Station as if it were the AAA office (well, you could I suppose…). The lack of social opportunities has probably been the single biggest adjustment to my lifestyle that I’ve had to make.
JAN11 | APPRIZE 7