INTRODUCING: Liz Galvao, Private Eye

So, this is exciting! When I had the idea to make a blog about pyramidroming (OK, so back then it didn’t have a name yet, whatever), I knew I’d need a fabulous friend to take on the beast with me. I was thinking of people I know who are smart, artistic, hilariously sarcastic and (yes) FUNEMPLOYED, and my good friend Liz Galvao immediately jumped to mind. Liz writes a great blog that I read all the time, and YOU can read it too! It’s here: THESE MODERN SOCKS.

Liz graduated with me from Vassar and currently lives in the great state of New Jersey. As a fellow “I majored in something super fun and completely irrelevant to the real world” type of person, Liz shares a lot of my sentiments. In her post, she contemplates the road ahead and gives the thumbs up to all the dirty Jersey drivers she passes on the highway of life:

SO, WHAT’S NEXT?

Recently, my neighbor across the street called out to me as I was walking out to my car. “Did you graduate?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, with a forced smile.

“Oh, congratulations,” she replied earnestly. “So, what’s next?”

“I don’t know.”

She gave me the thumbs-up and said, “Sounds good.”

No, it didn’t sound good, but I can’t blame her for not knowing the appropriate thing to say. I’ve been known to involuntarily throw a thumbs-up or two out of sheer awkwardness myself. The truth is, I’ve had a harder time accepting the congratulations I’ve received since graduating college than the uncomfortable responses to, “No, I don’t have a job.” It was never my idea to leave college in the first place. Sure, after four years, writing term papers and drinking foamy keg beer got a little old. But who’d want to leave an environment where you have almost all of the freedoms of adulthood with hardly any of the responsibilities?

I certainly didn’t. But, of course, reality and my student loans came knocking, and I begrudgingly graduated with the rest of the class of 2009. In all the photos from my commencement I have a look of sick terror on my face. None of us had jobs. Oh, the occasional well-connected kid had a paid internship, and a few were staving off the inevitable with graduate school, but the vast majority of us were flung out into the real world with the future completely blank. For a group of people who’d up to that point had a step-by-step plan for their lives laid out for them by guidance counselors and parents, it was overwhelming to be told, “Good luck!” in a way that meant, “It’s all up to you now!”

I majored in film in college with an emphasis on production. This means that many of my assignments basically consisted of a group of us being given equipment and told to go make a short film. It was as good an approach as any to teaching a medium best learned from experience. The results varied from hilariously self-important to surprisingly beautiful.

But like I said, film skills are best acquired through experience, and in graduating college I realized how much more of that I needed in order to actually call myself a professional filmmaker. At graduation my brother asked me, “So now, could you, like, direct a TV show?” Well, no. I could maybe direct a viral YouTube video, if I had my own camera, which I don’t. What a great idea, developing a passion for the most expensive medium outside of bedazzling human skulls with diamonds.

What can you do when you have almost no real industry experience and the economy is the worst since the Great Depression? For one thing, you can write for your friend’s blog about being alternatively employed. Another option is to do unpaid work. Directly after graduation I worked on a professor’s extremely low budget short film with several other recent graduates. It was a strange experience shooting on our now-empty campus and breaking into parts of buildings I’d never been in four years. It was even weirder staying in a dorm again after a year in senior housing. Ultimately, though, it was a fitting goodbye to my college years. The twelve-hour days kept me from thinking about my friends scattering all over the country, and being a part of a project so saturated in earnestness cheered me up considerably. There were other ways of becoming a filmmaker besides instantly getting hired by Harvey Weinstein.

Currently I’m living in the oft-mocked state of New Jersey with my parents and trying to live and work in New York City. In my writings on this blog I hope to chronicle my growth from amateur to professional, and share some of my friends’ experiences making their ways up from the bottom in this difficult economy. My parents have given me a great deal of (unsolicited) advice since graduation. In hearing how they’d approach looking for a job I’ve realized how different the process is now from when they were new graduates in the late sixties. I look forward to finding out more about what sets my generation apart as we enter the workforce. I still have no idea what’s next, but figuring it out in a whole new way sounds good to me.