Your position relative graduation can be a big factor as to whether or not, and how, people judge you and choose to make snide little comments behind your back, or even more likely, to your face.
It's getting close to that time in life that you can't simply say, "Well, he/she's still in school...." This simply phrase once let us avoid more faux-pas sentences like "He's a philosophy major, Daddy!" (though this is usually followed by a fit of screaming somehow involving, 'BUT I LOVE HIM!' and the perpetual classic 'I HATE YOU!'.
Anyway.
I was talking to a friend of mine this morning, and had to realize that I'm almost a grown up. He was talking about a girl that he might date, and I asked what her major was. Apparently, she's graduated. I know people that have graduated. But it still blew me away for some reason. Now, we don't get the aforementioned trump card phrase. "She's still in school" gave us such possibilities. It gave us the possibility that she could be studying bio, then going to med school and finally curing cancer. We didn't need to know that she was studying gender equality and becoming a haughty receptionist who tells you where her eyes were, which I can only assume is a throw-back to her anatomy class days, back when I made up that she was curing cancer and shit.
Meeting people who have already graduated (and are actually done with school) can sometimes be scary. I mean, when you're an English major and you meet someone who has graduated from the same program a couple years ago and they're driving a porsche and holding a D&G purse, you feel terrific (and subsequently congratulate them for winning the lottery...). But, when you meet them as your new coworker who is earning as much of you, but actually has had to start paying back their OSAP and so ends up with less spending money than you.... Well, you panic.
For now, the real world scares me, and I'll sit in my ivory tower of academia and research grad school.
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