Before you start
Confirm the offer details in writing, complete the background check and any pre-employment steps, and read the benefits enrollment materials — you usually have a short window after your start date to choose health insurance, retirement contributions, and other benefits, and the defaults are not always what you want. If there is a gap between graduation and the start date, sort out health coverage for it.
The money setup
Direct deposit, tax withholding (the W-4 — the default often over-withholds; a paycheck estimator helps you set it), and your retirement contribution. If there is an employer match, contribute at least enough to get all of it from day one — it is part of your pay. Student loan repayment starts after your grace period (usually six months); set up autopay and know your servicer.
Learning the job
The first weeks feel like being a first-year again — new systems, new norms, being the most junior person. Ask questions, take notes, find the person who will answer the "dumb" ones, and do not try to prove yourself by staying late every night. Ninety days in, most people have their footing.
Keep the network warm
Tell the people who helped you — faculty, a mentor, a coach, the alumni who did informational interviews — where you landed and thank them. Connect with new colleagues. The habit of a light check-in with your network once or twice a year starts now, while you have a good reason to reach out.
Career Services still works
Career for Life means you keep access to coaching as an alumnus — for the first job that turns out to be wrong, for a raise or promotion conversation, for a pivot in a few years. The alumni career resources and the mentor network are yours. Use them; a lot of graduates forget they exist.
Give the job a real chance
A first job that is 70% right is normal and worth staying in for a while — you learn the most in the first two years, and job-hopping too fast reads poorly. If it is genuinely wrong (the work, the ethics, the manager), a coach can help you plan a move deliberately rather than jumping.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.