As graduation approaches, I’m starting to realize there really aren’t a lot of cool things you can do with a bachelor’s degree. Sure, we’ve all dreamt of being swept up into the ranks of the California Department of Corrections after visiting their booth at the career fair, but instead most of us will end up at a 60 hour-a-week job in consulting or finance, or at a non-profit.

In the interest of finding out how far your B.A. will get you right out of college, I interviewed some friends who recently graduated. To lend a patina of scientific precision to this sham survey, I have boiled the typical graduate down into a handful of common “types.” I have excluded people who went immediately to graduate school, which we all know is just a desperate attempt to prolong adolescence.

The first and most common type I’ll call “This Wasn’t What I Signed Up For!” These people didn’t want to step onto a career fast track right away, so they took an interesting-sounding job that would pay the bills and hopefully give them some valuable experience. Then they learned the truth — most entry-level jobs really suck, so unless your crappy job is going to lead to a better one soon, get out fast.

My friend Emily is a University of Pennsylvania graduate who got tricked into taking a job with a hip European software company, where she thought she would be doing sales for a little while before moving into a more creative role in management or marketing. But behind the slick facade, the job was just straight-up sales, where she spent ten hours a day cold-calling people to peddle some obscure digital product she could barely explain, all so she could fulfill a monthly quota. Although she had never quit anything before, Emily finally threw in the towel after eight months.

“It always takes more courage to quit than to stay,” she told me. “Even if it’s a job you hate.”

At this rate, her savings will run out by the end of the summer, so now she is busy applying for jobs, sometimes as many as five a day. A liberal arts major, her biggest regret is not taking a couple of courses that would have provided some basic business skills.

“I always used to look down on all the kids at Wharton,” she said, referring to the undergraduate business program at UPenn. “Now I’m kicking myself for not taking Finance 101.”

When I asked my friend Jamie what category of post-grads she fit into, she burst out laughing: “You should call it — ‘People who had big ideals that got crushed.’” Jamie, is working at an inner-city school through a program similar to Teach for America.

She was parachuted into one of the worst school districts in the country, where the teacher retention rate, she estimates, is well under 50 percent. Her job consists almost entirely of discipline, and her students commonly refer to her — not mean-spiritedly, she hastens to add — as “cracker” and “white bitch.”

“I could have taken 900 courses in education, and it wouldn’t have prepared me for this,” she said.

Despite admitting that every day is like pushing a boulder up a hill, Jamie plans to return to teach next year to honor the two-year contract she filed with the district.

“I can’t justify not going back,” she sighs. “It’s rough, but I’m stuck.”

The third type I call “Slowly Adjusting to Adulthood.” Boring, right? Not so fast. My friend Peter, who has a consulting job in New York, a steady girlfriend and an apartment on the Upper East Side, explains that the first year of post-grad life is considerably more stressful than college.

“You want to put yourself in a situation where five years down the road, you’ll know what you want,” Peter said.

The fourth type is the “College Safety Net.” This guy or gal isn’t ready to give up the ghost of college life, so they move into a Dead House or an apartment in Palo Alto and then pick up right where they left off at Stanford. As a co-term, I’m probably closest to this type. You can find us playing Beirut in undergrad dorms around campus and dropping by the Rose and Crown every week for Trivia Night.

The final type I call “See you — Never!” My former roommate Jarret is one of these. He joined the Peace Corps to spend 27 months teaching English in Jordan. This type essentially drops off the face of the earth, except for the occasional email in which they endlessly defer to later, longer email they promise to write. “I only have two minutes at the Internet cafe in Kigali, I’ll talk to you again in June!”

Well, future graduate, there you have a complete (read: partial) menu of post-grad lifestyles — so pick your poison. Look at the bright side, at least we’re not in a recession — what’s that? — well, shit.

Brendan hopes to shortly transition from “College Safety Net” to “This Isn’t What I Signed Up For!” Wish him luck at bselb "at" stanford.edu.