PSYC 23
What Comes Next? Critical Approaches to Life After College Winter 2025

Discussions of post-grad with college students are often limited to the topics of careers, life skills, personal finances, and reaching key milestones. This course will take up an expansive view of life after college that decenters these more conventional topics. Instead, we’ll explore life beyond work, how to build and sustain communities, politics and civic engagement, learning outside of higher education institutions, identity formation, reimagined ambition, and much more. We’ll engage with research, personal narratives, and fictional depictions relating to the years after college. Students will examine and critique cultural expectations and anxieties surrounding college graduates. Some class time will be reserved for topics chosen by students. Work outside of class will include weekly journal reflections, an interview assignment, preparation of two brief presentations, and a final five-page paper exploring selected ideas from the course. Students will finish the course with an expanded vision for life after college and a critical analysis of conventional narratives and wisdom about young adulthood.