Senior Ashley Wohl is having a quarter-life crisis.

She knows she isn’t moving back home to Laurel, Md., after college, and she knows she wants to work in a design firm. But she doesn’t know what exactly she is going to do with her life, and has begun to feel a bit panicky.

To cure some of her panic, the graphic design major decided she’ll move to Chicago after graduation this May. She still has not met with her adviser to plan her job applications – partially, she says, because she’s in denial of the approaching toss into the unknown.

‘Did I pick the right major? Will I get the right job? Will I like what I’m doing?’ Wohl wondered aloud. ‘The fact that I’m uncertain freaks me out.’

While every generation may face the same feelings of confusion, ambition, loneliness and pressure, the crisis has begun to strike the huge population bubble of baby boomers’ children, now creeping into their mid-20s. Recent societal pressures, and the old standbys of education, media, family and friends, make young adults feel the heat more than ever. Even bits of pop culture – from John Mayer lyrics to the themes from the popular indie flick, ‘Garden State’ – prove many college seniors and recent graduates desperately long to find love, a job and purpose.

Like the pressure on high school students – and even those who are younger – to participate in the most activities, earn the best grades and attend the best universities, college students face similar pressures when looking into their relatively directionless future. They must make the right connections, create the best portfolio or resume, win the most awards and get the best GPA to obtain the most prestigious and lucrative job out there.

Seniors, with a hazy future several months away, feel the first stirrings of a quarter-life crisis when beginning their job search. Of 2,239 graduates from the class of 2003, 71 percent were immediately employed full time, while 18 percent entered graduate school, according to the SU Center for Career Services survey. Five percent of those graduates are still unemployed.

‘We see a lot of students who are in crisis,’ said Gregory Victory, assistant director of the Center for Career Services. ”Oh my God, I’m graduating and I have to get a job.”

Today’s graduates seem to face an even greater amount of pressure to find glamorous and high-paying jobs, instead of focusing on what sort of job satisfies them the most, said Carter Hewgley, a Syracuse University graduate student studying public administration who attended the business school at Miami University of Ohio.

At trade schools especially, professors and administrators believe students have already found their passions, and therefore do not need to be engaged in many other fields or need to think beyond the field. Those who have done this by the time they’ve reached college are rare, and extremely lucky, Hewgley said.

Hewgley realized upon his graduation he did not want to pursue a career in business, but with four years trained to the trade, he had no idea what else he could do or how to move forward. So he took a year off and traveled around Europe. There he was able to forget resumes, forget the job hunt, forget the pressures from everyone else and just focus on what he wanted to do with his life.

‘But you can’t just dance around Europe for the rest of your life,’ Hewgley said. ‘At some point, you need to get a job.’

Sometimes students feel pressure from family, friends and the media to find the most glamorous job they can. Victory, who held four jobs before settling at the Center, quit his first job as a middle school teacher because his friends were making more money and had much more vacation time, and he felt he had something to prove.

‘This job wasn’t sexy enough,’ Victory said.

Many SU undergraduates face a mini-crisis just in choosing their majors because they believe they must find a job relating to it, Victory said. But while pursuing a major, some students change their minds, and finding a different type of job may be their best option.

‘My favorite line is, ‘Can I take one of those tests that will tell me what I can do for the rest of my life?” Victory said. ‘But that won’t really help to make the best conclusion.’

If students decide they want to attend graduate school, that decision sends up red flags that they really have no clue what they want to do, Victory said. At age 22, most students are not yet ready to attend graduate school, and could just be buying more time before making some sort of decision.

Chicago resident Abbie Gavrila, 23, decided to attend a fifth year at the University of Michigan to study education, because she did not know what she wanted to do after four years. But once she moved to Chicago and couldn’t find a teaching job, she realized teaching was not her ideal career. Now she plans to attend law school and feels slightly uneasy about being nearly 30 years old by the time she earns her law degree.

‘So many other things should’ve happened by this time,’ said Gavrila, who now holds a temporary job in a design showroom.

But much of the quarter-life crisis involves life outside of the nine-to-five job. The pressures to find a long-term boyfriend or girlfriend, to settle down and possibly have a family, begin to mount by the mid-20s. Magazine headlines and articles, MTV reality shows and 20-year celebrity marriages scream the message that if young adults do not find those relationships, they are abnormal, and students who buy into these messages may feel lonely and inferior.

Pressure from family members may also exacerbate the problem. Hewgley explained that because he was raised in a Southern family, where love and marriage is a huge priority for people his age, he always feels awkward when they ask why he is not yet starting a family.

”Why isn’t it happening to you?’ Well, it’s complete bullshit,’ he said. ‘It’s the worst thing to rush into anything – career, love, family.’

Gavrila, who moved to Chicago because many of her friends settled there, admits she feels the pressure to meet a serious boyfriend. But she enjoys being independent, and believes she will find someone at some point.

‘I don’t feel like if I don’t meet someone in the next week that I’ll be an old maid for the rest of my life,’ Gavrila said.

Despite the insecurities which may lead to personal panic in the early to mid-20s, the phrase quarter-life crisis lends the wrong connotation. Perhaps young adults need to experience those feelings to begin the process of reevaluating their lives and finding their true places in society, Hewgley said.

‘It’s everything but a crisis,’ Hewgley said. ‘It’s pivotal.’

Published on October 21, 2004 at 12:00 pm