This One's For the Girls

I was very lucky to have a close group of girls that comprised my cohort in grad school. We were 10 Masters/Advanced Certificate students (plus 5 PhD that we had some classes with) all about the same age. We spent so much time together for three years that it was easy to make some good friendships. When we went on internship, our cohort was unique in that almost all of us stayed in the Western NY area, and even more specifically, the same city/suburbs. The majority of us still live here, which is fantastic.

When graduation hit and we were thrust out of "going to class" and into "looking for a job" mode, life became a little more difficult. Instead of seeing each other every day or week, it turned into once a month. Towards the end of the summer, we got together to celebrate engagements and new hirings and vowed that we had to have monthly get-togethers. Tonight, I had dinner with a few of the girls to celebrate one of them getting hired for a short-term position. It was great to catch up and hear how their jobs have been going, trade stories and frustrations, laugh about grad school days and crazy colleagues, and just be "the cohort" again.

So gals, since we're big kids now, here's to wedding planning, turning 30 ("What? She's 30?!"), getting a job that's less than 40 minutes from home, and getting to do what we were trained to do. And damnit, we're good at it!