Ask HN: What did you do in your first year after school?

Been 3 months since I graduated, I have been working.

Corporate life is much more lame than I anticipated it'd be.

I went straight to work. I took about 6 months and many interviews to find a job, so I did some labouring work while looking for a coding position. Travelling around the world seemed too scary / not me.

In retrospect I wished I had given a PhD a go. Even if I dropped out I'd just get a job, and the stipend was generous enough for a single person to live.

I encourage people to consider travelling even if they thing it's not for them. It doesn't have to be like everyone else does it. I'd go back and travel to meet other like minded tech people, go to tech conferences, and get some nature walks in amazing places. It would be light on the partying and well trodden backpacker routes, using non-plane transport as much as possible. It also could be 2 weeks initially with an option to go home or carry on.

After I graduated with a computer science degree, I spent a year playing competitive chess. I had already dedicated a lot of my free time in the last two years of my degree to chess and I couldn't wait to be done with school so that I could go all-in on chess.

I learned a lot of valuable life lessons during that year and I am glad I took that time before diving right into my career in tech. At the time, I was nervous that I was ruining my life by not getting started right away at a "real job", but things turned out completely fine -- in fact, I think my manager at my first big tech job was more intrigued by my chess skills than my coding skills :)

I had a kid when I was 15. Getting to work post undergrad degree was imperative. Heck, working _during_ my degree was an absolute requirement. But work post-degree meant I could earn more. I minored in CS, my major was business. In my first year post undergrad, I went to work immediately selling and servicing insurance. Sometime after, I then moved onto financial services, then to construction as I got my teaching credential, then teaching, and, finally, after all that, eventually found my way to a 2yo start up doing software development (toss in a couple more kids along the way). It took me about 7 years to find software, and now I've been doing that ever since. It was the first time we had some wiggle room in our finances. We got our first real travel-somewhere-vacation last year. Never had a real vacation before software (even as a teacher). The first several years as a developer, time off meant repair projects around the house.

Long story to say that it's ok to not get directly into your career if you can manage it, but realize that the cost is potentially a year longer/delay on your financial goals, whether that be your ability to raise a family, buy a car, purchase a house, or until retirement. Also, once you have responsibilities, you won't likely be able to get back off that treadmill.

Not exactly the kind of school you’re implying, but I’ve spent the past year after my high school graduation working. I’m currently a software engineer at an asset management firm and will start university simultaneously soon :)

I took a temporary job that was not in my field (software development), stayed there for a few months then joined a product life-cycle management startup as a web developer for half a year. That didn't work out, so I quit, then went back to that temporary job.

I'll be taking the GRE in September and am applying for graduate programs in my area.

Straight into work, as school was rounding off I sent of applications to various companies and NGO's over the world. The responses were interesting enough not to need an OE or something. Just go work where you will want to travel.