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But the scene was different. We drank the same beer, ordered the same vodka-tonics, but no one danced -- certainly not for long. Cliques congealed, complaints got aired. We talked about the presidential election or that book proposal we were working on or that brainless job we had to go to the next morning. Cheery nostalgia was not the order of the night. I felt tired and a little drunk from the dinner party hours before. Then I just wanted to go home.

The anti-climatic graduation experience -- I know, I know, this is not news to former master's and Ph.D. students. Things are different from those winsome undergraduate days. Most of us are only in classes for a couple years, we have lives off campus, actual graduation ceremonies may not even happen at all. (Mine isn't until May and I have no intention of going -- it's in Yankees Stadium, for Christ sake.) Life goes on much as it was before we enrolled.

So no, nothing about graduation was particularly surprising. Yet the ambiguity of those December weeks has stayed with me as I've started to look for a job and steady freelance work. Grad school was great -- as were the kids in my program (all 14 of them), most of whom I plan on keeping in touch with -- but the last couple months have been tough.

There are of course solutions to the post-degree doldrums -- or if not "solutions," then at least a productive way to keep your mind off the next 40 years of employment: work as a research assistant. Needle your j-school professors for names, and a writer in need of some help with a book or a few feature stories is sure to emerge. Do the work, and they'll pay you for it. Do a good job, and you're guaranteed to come away with a handful of helpful contacts.

Some professors won't even need the nagging. Over the holidays, my religion journalism professor sent me an email asking if I wanted to work for a Los Angeles Times editorial writer who needed help finishing up a book about the culture wars. (This was the same journalist who had visited our class last fall to talk about his work covering the Catholic Church.) Sure, I said, why not. The pay wasn't spectacular, but I'd only be contracted for a month and I had nothing else to do.

The work -- which consisted primarily of Internet research and haggling non-profits on the phone for financial information -- was a little tedious. But it was done before I knew it, and I emerged with a couple meaty industry contacts stuffed in my back pocket. I'm having coffee with a New York Times editor next week.

This kind of thing happens all the time. It was working as a research assistant for an editor at Domino that got me that internship at The New Yorker last summer. (Remember, nearly every Cond� Nast publication is housed in the same building. All my friend at Domino had to do was shoot my resume up a couple flights of stairs.) Absent an internship at a decent journal -- a gig that often doesn't pay a cent these days -- helping out a fellow writer in need is often the easiest way to score a paycheck and a few contacts.

In an ideal world, I'd be a staff writer at Spin and live in the West Village. In the real world, I'll be happy if I can nail a 30-hour-a-week copyediting job at a publication I'm not embarrassed about -- say Radar or Men's Vogue -- that would leave me enough time to freelance. (And I'm content to stay in Park Slope.) That's what I'm shooting for. It's just a matter of sending those resumes out and waiting ... waiting...

John MacDonald recently graduated from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. He lives in Brooklyn. He can be reached at jmacdonald324 at GMAIL dot COM.