To Live At Home Or Not To: The Post-Grad Question

It’s a common nightmare among college seniors.  Graduating job-less, and making the slow, shameful march back into your childhood bedroom, South Park posters and all. Luckily for all of our collective self-esteems, what used to be a sign of despair has become the norm for millennials. These days, it’s fairly common for college grads to be living at home with Mom & Dad for the first few months (er, years), whether we’re job-searching or just saving our first few months of salary to prep for the insanity of NYC rent.

I feel particularly equipped to address this subject, since I am one of these college grads livin’ the home-cooked dream. I graduated in May 2016, got a job at this dope start-up (Scouted, heyy), and moved back to Connecticut to live with my parents.

So, college seniors, if you’re trying to decide whether to save dat money and regress back to teenagehood, I give you my official “Pros & Cons of Living at Home”:

Pro of living at home: Financial Responsibility

See, I use phrases like financial responsibility now. Because I’m an adult. I’m also an adult in my ability to avoid forking over 70% of my monthly paycheck to pay for a 90 sq ft bedroom with a fake wall on Avenue D. Even though recent grads have faced one of the most compelling job markets in years, the cost of living has been steadily increasing along with it. Living at home has afforded me the ability to steadily increase my savings account, so when I do inevitably move out I’ll have a cushion to fall back on. Go me.

Con of living at home: Commuting

Turns out that commuting while living at home, well, sucks.  On average, Americans waste nearly 50 hours annually commuting with commuters in more metropolitan areas topping close to 75 hours. I personally commute nearly 3.5 hours daily, from my parents’ home in Connecticut to our office in midtown Manhattan. On top of the wasted time, paying for 10 weekly train rides cuts into those aforementioned savings. On the bright side, there’s apparently a petition circulating to bring back the bar car to my train line, so at least I can have the companionship of Bud Light en route home.  Commuting costs time, money, and productivity. Major con.

Pro of living at home: Hanging out with your parents

I love my parents! I mean, er, they’re cool or whatever. It’s definitely an adjustment to be back home after almost 4 years of “living on my own” at school. Transitioning from sporadic visits to seeing your parents daily really reminds you of how awesome your parents are! They give great advice, like how to find the right credit card or what’s appropriate to wear in a client meeting. They stock your bathroom with the soft kind of toilet paper, and wake you up when you miss your alarm. And sometimes they have cool friends that make for great networking opportunities. Daily hangouts with the people who know you best: Pro, for days.

Con of living at home: Hanging out with your parents

Ah, the flip side. Alongside the joys of Charmin and a fully-stocked fridge, we have some downsides here. Turns out, you can’t use your bedroom floor as a closet or throw your beer on the floor when you’re done drinking it. You have to dump out your cereal bowl when you’re done with it. And sometimes your parents invite all their friends over and you have to explain to 20 (well-meaning) old people what you’re doing with your life and why you’re living at home. And of course, there’s the constant FOMO as you sit home on a Saturday night watching National Treasure while your friends send snapchats all of their awesome shenanigans.

Pro of living at home: The Fridge

Man, nothing beats a home cooked meal, especially after four years of ramen and Busch heavy. Given that I had some horrendous eating habits while at college, it is nice to enjoy a well-rounded diet that only *occasionally* includes pizza, and has all these green items that I’ve heard so much about. It is also something that brings my family together. We have just about all of our meals together and it really has allowed me to reconnect with my parents.

Con of living at home: (Not) doing grown-up / real people things

Sometimes I worry that I’m missing out on valuable life experiences that everyone in their early twenties should be going through on their own. Paying bills, shopping for my own groceries, doing laundry: my current set-up requires none of these things. Am I regressing? Maybe. Is it kind of great not to worry about any of these things? Hell yes. Nevermind, I regret bringing this up.    

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Overall, I am very grateful that my parents are letting me live at home. And it is genuinely nice to spend time with them after a busy four years of college. But I’m also looking forward to getting to the next step – and make sure I start becoming as accomplished and successful as my parents are.  So here’s to hoping that my next blog entry is titled “The Apartment Search”!

If you want more content related to millennials, the job search, or life be sure to visit the Scouted blog!

Back when I was in college, it felt like everyone majored in Econ, or Econ and something else (CS in my case).  At a school with no undergrad business program, Econ was the gateway major to that ultimate of career paths: financial services.  You know, whatever it is that investment bankers do.  I imagine we all figured knowing a thing or two about global markets and the velocity of money and all that would provide the appropriate foundation for a long and prosperous career in making it rain.

Nearly fifteen years later, unsurprisingly, finance is as popular as ever.  I got to wondering, does that dogged pursuit of finance actually help in getting a job in the industry?

Does being interested in finance help or hurt you in the job search?

One of the questions we ask candidates up front is which of 26 job roles (things like finance, marketing, and software engineering) seem interesting.  Candidates can pick as many or as few of these as they want, and a solid 10% of the pool says they want finance (we label as “Financial Analyst”).

In fact, 6.89% of our candidates say Financial Analyst and nothing else!  I suppose this isn’t too surprising: ~22% of our candidates pick just one job role.  A similar number picks just Marketing.  Most of the candidate pool, however, is open to other possibilities.

Given there are over 67 million ways of selecting job roles, it’s interesting to look at the correlations of those choices.  

Following the Financial Analyst row across, we can see negative (red) correlations with pretty much everything except stereotypically business stuff such as accounting, or data analysis. Clearly, folks looking for finance jobs are generally not looking for HR or writing gigs.

To be fair, these correlations commingle our full-time candidates with the interns.  Separating them apart, we can see similar interests most of the time, but pretty big gaps on a few categories, including finance.

A relatively bigger chunk of the full-time pool opts in for finance roles.  We’ve offered twice as many finance roles for full-timers as we’ve had for interns, so that likely has a big impact.  

Interested in writing? Maybe your secret calling is finance!

As an alternate theory, when I was looking for internships in college, I was more interested in exploring varied opportunities before settling into a career following graduation.  Perhaps this mentality still holds? In any event, here’s the surprising chart.

Of those full-time searchers who opt-in for finance jobs, it’s not the aspiring financiers who do best, but the writers and editors who’ve been most likely to see a Round-2 interview! (NB: past performance does not guarantee future results.)

Part of this is certainly a numbers game. We don’t have many novelists opting into our finance opportunities; but those candidates who do must be pretty strong, as they get lots of interviews.

Of course, we can make charts tell whatever story we want, but our data shows that clients hiring for finance do not have a bias for candidates who want to work exclusively in finance. If we flip the data a bit, we can see that financial analysts are getting interviews, well, everywhere!

Conclusions

The moral here?  Even financial analysts (and engineers) have to write, and sometimes product managers do marketing, and sometimes human resources does sales.  So cast a wide net and don’t let the search parameters be a limiting factor.  Your resume may bleed finance (or Econ), but don’t let that stop you from thinking about or being considered for a job one or even two derivatives over.  And lastly, though we might not be offering traditional i-banking roles (yet!), if you’re early on in your college years, even if, ya know, you’re dead set on spending your twenties as a corporate slave, don’t be afraid to explore the physics or philosophy departments while you have the chance.

This analysis exemplifies how everyone on Scouted benefits from our data-driven approach to matching: candidates get presented with great opportunities that they may have ordinarily overlooked, yet that still fit well with their set of values and abilities; clients gain access to not just a capable, but a diversified roster of excited applicants; and we at Scouted learn how to make the job search and hiring process easier to navigate with greater and greater success rates for everyone on the platform.

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A few weeks ago during Scouted team lunch, I joked that I’d write a blog post about how to prep your toddler for the Ivy League. So, true to my word, here are my initial thoughts on college prep for my three-year old daughter, Riley.

Preparing your Toddler for the Ivy League 

Let’s start at the beginning.  From birth through kindergarten, you learn more than you do from kindergarten through the rest of your life.  I made that stat up, but it sounds pretty good.  Think about what babies need to learn: digestion, processing sensory input, communication and language, movement, socialization and sharing, standing and the physics of falling, emotions…it’s a ton of stuff.  When was the last time you learned a new language?  Babies are like sponges – at no point in our lives are we better suited to learning new stuff than we are in the earliest years of life.

Some theorize that the more knowledge you feed kids in their earliest years, the quicker they’ll learn that stuff, and the sooner they can progress to the more advanced material.  In other words, if you can get your baby processing visual signals faster, the sooner that baby will have the acuity to follow along as you read to them; the sooner you’re reading to them, the quicker they get to mastering language.  It’s a slippery slope to writing War and Peace.  The idea is that if you can accelerate all the early learnings, you can take greater advantage of the fungibility of that early sponge mind.

Exposure + Active Engagement = Success

Assuming the above was accurate, we started Riley out on a full regimen of baby exercises: flickering lights on and off to strengthen eye muscles, tickling feet to trigger the Babinski reflex, and of course flash cards on everything from words and numbers to flowers and insects.  (I’m not joking.) We kept to this routine for months, tweaking it as Riley got older each week and month, eventually tapering it off once life got too hectic.  By that point, Riley was an incredibly verbal and loquacious kid, and at least, according to her completely impartial parents, speaking at a level years beyond her age.

As Riley got older (like a year older), we started her in gymboree, swimming lessons, and Spanish. Conejo, brinca!  And soccer.  It’s not really soccer when the kids can barely stand – more just a means of getting familiar with the idea of a soccer ball, or playing outside with other kids who’d also rather eat the grass or play with the water dispenser.  Our intent and hope was to expose Riley to as much as possible and see what stuck.  She didn’t want to sit with me at the piano, but did want to dance to every song on the radio (YouTube), especially Katy Perry but never (thankfully) The Chainsmokers.

We are not tiger parenting nor in any way restricting creative play.  (We spent hours this past weekend throwing paper airplanes around.)  What we believe we’re doing is ensuring that Riley has every opportunity we can afford to find her strengths and happiness, especially at such a young age while her sponge brain is still open to the world and establishing formative neural connections.

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Let Your Colors Burst!

Hopefully it’s obvious that I’m not actually prepping my toddler for the Ivy League. There is a moral here though: consider approaching life, especially as you think about applying to college or graduating from college, as if you still have a toddler’s sponge brain.  Try out as many different activities as you can, find what sticks, and then go deep.  Colleges and companies alike want a well rounded student body or roster of purposefully passionate individuals. Join the extra clubs so you can decide if you like them; try out for the intramural team and see if it’s your thing; go rock climbing or swing dancing because you might not have another chance for who knows how long (I spent a term doing each at Dartmouth).  Figure out what you’re good at and what makes you happy, because it’s good for you and shines on a college application or resume.  

Our ability to learn diminishes as we get older, so now is and will always be the best time to learn or try something new.  Perhaps some will find my parental advice a bit crazed, but at least consider how it applies for yourself, even if it means Katy Perry dance parties every night.

**The baby in the adorable graduation gown is in fact not Craig Perler’s toddler