After graduation: Five real-world steps to success

With graduation day around the corner, Modern Parenthood caught up with Cindy Brown, author of the book “The Girls Guide to Swagger,” to ask her what her top tips would be for new graduates going off into the “real world.” 

2. Dream big

Stephan Savoia/AP
John Fiorenzo, center, catches a brief nap during the address to the graduates at his Boston College Commencement ceremony while a classmate yawns behind him at Alumni Stadium on the university's campus in Boston, Monday, May 21, 2012. Fellow graduates Patrick Dingham, left, and Brandan Kirby, right, watch the stadium's jumbotron.

Brown says she encouraged her students to think about what they would like to be doing in five years. 

“Imagine yourself superbly happy,” she says. “Are you designing clothes? Are you in the Peace Corps? Are you working in the inner city?” 

Write a bit about that vision.  And then figure out what you can do in the next year or so to make steps toward that dream.

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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