Adjusting Expectations for Recent Graduates Entering the Workforce

Staci L. Parker, PhD President, Maryland Career Development Association

It was 1969. I was five years old and about to embark on what I would imagine to be the best day of my life: my first day in public school. I had watched my oldest sister go to school and return with fascinating stories and samples of what she had been learning while she was there. She said it was “Homework”—lessons she practiced at home. “Goody,” I thought. I would help her do some of the practice lessons and, when the time came for me to go to school, I would be ready!

Fast forward to my first day of school. I had one of my best dresses on, black patent leather shoes, and laced socks that folded down to drape over them. My mother styled my hair just the way I loved it and as a gift, she gave me a blue patent leather briefcase—I looked like a miniature professor. Mission accomplished. My goal was to become a teacher one day. After all, I loved learning, so it was befitting to have such an ambition.

The big moment came. I walked in the room that would literally define my career decades later. My expectations were much higher. My idea of going to school had been a fantasy for years, as a young student. I thought that school was a place for students to learn, where teachers engaged and opened young minds to endless possibilities in education. Instead, I walked in a classroom of shear chaos. I thought in my five-year-old mind, “This cannot be right! I must be in the wrong class.”

There were children running around recklessly. “Where’s the teacher?” my mother asked another parent walking in with us. I thought to myself, “Please don’t leave me here with them,” but once the adults sorted everything out, they left us … me, in this environment. This was not what I expected in those early years of preparing myself to enter school. This was the moment that I decided that I no longer