Category Archives: Blog

Life After Bryn Mawr Open Sessions!

Life After Bryn Mawr Open Session Poster - Tuesdays 12-1 in DVR on April 17, 24, and May 1

Life After Bryn Mawr Open Session Poster

Life After Bryn Mawr is holding open sessions for any and all graduating seniors! Members of the LABM Committee will be there to answer any questions you have about post-grad life and will have resources about a variety of topics, including:

  • Cooking
  • Budgeting
  • Finding Housing
  • Grad Schools/Further Education
  • Dealing with Unemployment

These Open Sessions will be held Tuesdays from 12-1 in the DVR Room in NDDH on:

  • April 17
  • April 24
  • May 1

 

Life After Bryn Mawr Senior Week 2017 Events!

As we rapidly approach the end of the semester, here are the events we will be holding during Senior Week 2017. Stop by any of these events to learn about particular topics that may apply to your life after Bryn Mawr!

Can you pay my bills? Budgeting & basic financial mindfulness after BMC
Dorothy Vernon Room, New Dorm Dining Hall
12-1PM
May 8

“Can you pay my bills? Budgeting & financial mindfulness after BMC” will explore how to proactively think about your finances after graduating, including how to budget within your salary, how to save money, how to assess spending priorities etc. The content of this session will primarily come from first person experience, shared by current young staff members, as well as tried and true best practice tips. We will also be providing you with online resources to peruse as you start to piece together what your post-grad spending will look like.

Life After the Meal Plan
Dorothy Vernon Room, New Dorm Dining Hall
12-1PM
May 9

Bryn Mawr College Dining Services Assistant Director, Richard Clow, will provide tips on how to equip your kitchen, resources for cookbooks and healthy eating on a budget!

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Apartments, Roommates, Landlords: Finding Housing after BMC Panel Recap

At our most recent Life After Bryn Mawr event on April 10th, members of the Life After Bryn Mawr Committee (Rachel Heiser, Jancy Munguia ’14 and Palak Bhandari ’16) and Cruz Arroyo, Administrative Assistant in LILAC, discussed the basics of navigating housing after Bryn Mawr.

For those of you that may have missed this session, we will be planning to hold a second session during Senior Week 2017. Below is a compilation of some of the important takeaways from this session.

Key People to know about when finding housing

When finding housing, it is important to know the different people you may come into contact with throughout the search process and while you are renting a property.

Realtor – Essentially the person that helps to generate interest in a property and connects two parties; after finding housing, you may not interact with a realtor as frequently, if at all.

Landlord/Property Manager – The person who arranges the lease agreement, takes care of daily needs at the property and is the go-to person for maintenance needs

Property Owner – The person who actually owns the building and land that the property is on.

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Upcoming Events – Spring 2017

Keep checking back to hear about more interesting events happening in Spring 2017 that will help inform you about Life After Bryn Mawr!

Life After Bryn Mawr Calendar (event descriptions below)

Apartments, Roommates, Landlords: Finding Housing after BMC
12-1PM in DVR
April 10

Join members of the Life After Bryn Mawr (LABM) Committee to learn how to navigate finding housing in your post-grad life. Learn the dos and dont’s about roommates and landlords as well as some tips to keep in mind while searching for housing!

Post Grad Life Planning Sessions
2-4 PM in Campus Center Mezzanine (2nd level)
April 2, 9, 16, 23

Every Sunday in April (except for April 30), we will be holding post-grad life planning sessions in the Campus Center Mezzanine from 2-4PM. These are meant to be informal opportunities where you can talk to members of LABM and plan out your post-grad life. The Career Peers will also be having walk-in hours, so feel free to bring any materials, questions, concerns,etc.

 

Post-Grad Life Advice

On November 30th, five recent graduates returned to Bryn Mawr to give advice about post-grad life to the Class of 2017. For those who missed it, we’ve compiled a summary of some of their words of wisdom about their experiences after graduation.

Our wonderful panelists: Bailey Cavanaugh '15, Airen McClure '16, Swetha Narasimhan '15, Miriam Doepner '16, and Frankie Leech '16.

Our wonderful panelists: Bailey Cavanaugh ’15, Airen McClure ’16, Swetha Narasimhan ’15, Miriam Doepner ’16, and Frankie Leech ’16.

Life Balance

Balancing all of our many obligations is still a challenge after graduating, but our panelists noted that they’ve found it easier, in some ways, since leaving Bryn Mawr. They recommend being proactive and finding ways to be social and try new things that you might have been too busy to do in college.

“Get a hobby. Get lots of hobbies. It’s harder to be social but it’s important to find ways to be productive in ways that you might never have had a chance to.”

Self-Advocacy

Several alums described experiences of having to evaluate job opportunities and decide whether they were a good fit. There can be a lot of pressure, both external and internal, to commit to something right away, but the panelists recommended not being in a rush to decide, and to know what you’re getting into. Advocating for yourself and knowing what will be a good work environment for you takes practice but is so worth it.

“[Turning down a job opportunity] was really hard for me because I’m not super confrontational and didn’t really have to do that at Bryn Mawr, but I had to think about myself.”

Rewarding Experiences

Post-grad life can be tough but it comes with many rewards. Panelists talked about the excitement of being independent and living on their own, and about the feeling of knowing that their work and studying at Bryn Mawr had paid off. Jobs can bring new rewards as well – taking initiative to start a project that you feel strongly about and being able to take ownership of that work has been meaningful to recent grads.

“I’m actually where I want to be…it feels sort of strange to say that out loud – I didn’t expect to be here so soon.”

Advice

Some final recommendations and words of wisdom from our panel:

“Get off campus. Go spread your wings. Go do something. Just leave. It was so good to just take a breath.”

“Think consciously about what your support network is. Find ways to solidify that and be conscious about keeping in contact with people.”

“It is very normal to graduate and not have a job.”

“Use the Bryn Mawr network. You never know where you’re going to end up.”

“You will find the people who are on your team after you graduate. It may take a little time, but you will find them.”

Say no (sometimes).

Don’t settle.

Know that hard work pays off.

Life 101: How to Adult

Thank you to Kirsten Adams ’16 for letting us reblog her post. Check out her BMC Banter Blog!

Text on lined paper. It says "that horrifying moment when you're looking for an adult but you realize you are an adult. so you look around for an older adult. an adultier adult. someone better at adulting than you.At the beginning of last semester, this meme was floating around the internet. It perfectly captured how I was feeling about recently turning 21 and preparing to enter the “real” world. During my internship last summer, one of my students came up to me and asked permission to do something. My first instinct was to tell them to ask “an adult” until I realized that I *was* the adult in the room, and I had the authority to give them an answer. The idea of becoming a better, “adultier adult” is especially relevant right now as I am starting to think about postgraduate life, expenses, and worries. Luckily for me, and every mawrter, Bryn Mawr has created programming geared towards helping students become prepared and confident adultier adults.

Last night I attended the second talk, “Life After Bryn Mawr: Milk and Cookies and a picture of the budget worksheet and the Life After Bryn Mawr punch cardCan You Pay My Bill?” with a handful of other seniors. Alums from different class years and staff from supporting departments and programs on campus were on hand to provide insight into postgraduate life, with this talk thinking specifically about finances and budgeting. Our first activity was to fill out a sample budget sheet with blank spaces for things like rent, cell phone, entertainment, charity, and insurance just to name a few necessities and luxuries that made the list. Looking at all of the rows and columns needing an estimate, it was pretty easy to get overwhelmed with all of the expenses associated with living outside of Bryn Mawr’s castle-like walls. The alums and staff however were there to calm our worries and give insight into how to make it all more manageable.

Milk and Cookies and Life After Bryn Mawr punch card

Milk and cookies make everything better!

We spent the rest of the time listening to the panel members talk about their experiences after college with money, finances, and budgeting, and we had an opportunity to ask questions. Throughout the discussion, words and terms swirled around us, some of which we weren’t familiar with. Everybody present was more than willing to explain and share their personal experiences with us which was very comforting and made the idea of finances post-college less intimidating. And, in true Bryn Mawr fashion, we were able to fill our tummies as we filled our minds with this truly invaluable information.

The two main ideas I came away from the discussion with were:

 

Figure out what is important to you. The alums made it clear that when coming up with our budgets, we should base it on what is important to us, and not necessarily on what is expected. What is important to one person may not be as important to somebody else, and that’s okay.

Being “independent” does not mean being alone. Just because we move into the real world does not mean that we can no longer ask for help, guidance, or support.

I’ve noticed during my time here that so much of what we talk about is getting through Bryn Mawr, but there isn’t as much conversation about what happens after we leave. I am so grateful for this series of talks about life after college and look forward to future events. It’s one thing to google these things, or read about them in books/online, but hearing from alumnae/i who have experienced what life is like at Bryn Mawr and then navigated the “real world”, makes hearing and understanding the information that much easier and more familiar. Thank you to everybody involved in this series! I am already feeling more confident knowing how much support there is for us, not only while we are on campus, but when we leave as well.

Hello from 2016 Class Presidents

Hello everyone!

Our names are Coco Wang and Chanel Williams and we’re excited that you’re visiting the Life After Bryn Mawr Blog. With graduation, and the real world, approaching, we hope that you find this blog helpful for providing tips on finding apartments, cooking, paying your bills and a lot more. There are also some comical aspects to the blog, because our transition out of Bryn Mawr should be fun, despite our concerns. We hope that you find this blog useful, and that you let us know if you have any questions that you would like to have answered, or ideas that you would like to see on the website.

We’re all in this together!

Coco Chanel

Letter from an Alumna: Cooking on a Budget

This week, we have a guest post from a 2014 graduate, Amanda Beardall! After Amanda graduated, she went on to serve as an AmeriCorps*VISTA member in Philadelphia, PA. She writes about her experience living at a poverty line salary and how she learned to budget for food. We hope to have posts each week so please send your submissions to bmclifehacks@gmail.com if this is something you’re interested in!

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