The Top 4 Cities You Should Be Moving To After Graduation

Moving after graduation is the big, daunting prospect none of us ever want to deal with. Undergrad is a nice shelter from the realities of the work world; realities that, by the way, suck harder than a black hole full of expensive Dyson vacuums. The best way to mitigate this is to choose a city that doesn’t make you want to treat Death of a Salesman like a self-help guide for the first couple years out of school. Your 20’s should be fun. Don’t let society convince you that you should be a real adult, because you aren’t yet. Depending on what you’re looking for, you have a lot of options.

 

Austin, Texas: The Fun City

If you’re still not quite out of your “drink five days a week and wake up at noon” phase, Austin might be the city for you. With the whole place basically going on vacation for SXSW and Austin City Limits every year, it’s a town dedicated to prolonging the amount of time you can manage to shotgun a beer without embarrassing yourself through loss of skill and tolerance. Austin is all about putting the “fun” in “functional alcoholism”, and as someone who just graduated college into a job market that tells you that entry level requires three years of experience, you’ll need that. With a great bar district and a ton of young, single people in their 20s, expect Tinder and Hinge to be full of attractive girls looking to bone. Just try not to blow your whole paycheck on blow.

 

Washington, DC: Work Hard, Party Hard

Are you a type-A asshole with a moderately high-paying job prospect and the desire to tell everyone about the congressmen you work for? Congrats, you should be moving to the place I like to call home: the nation’s capital. It’s a place where everyone is simultaneously dead serious and yet always less than 24 hours from drinking themselves into oblivion. Even our federal law enforcement occasionally gets in trouble for raging too hard and buying some hookers on work trips. As a result, DC takes a certain type of person. If you like a laid-back, friendly atmosphere, abandon all hope, ye who enter here. DC is the farthest thing from that. We’re like New Yorkers, but without the shocking lack of personal space to explain why we’re aggressive all the time. If you thrive in an environment where the pressure is always on and the pay is pretty good, DC will treat you well. With an amazing biotech corridor right outside the city and the defense infrastructure to support all the engineers you can cram into a NASA-Goddard conference room, DC has science and tech covered as well. DC’s copious number of quality bars- from frat bars to dives and clubs- means that you’ll never struggle to meet people in the city. DC has an incredibly high population of recent grads, meaning you’ll find a nice girl to bring home to mom and dad. Though, knowing DC, during the day she’ll be a ruthlessly power-hungry lawyer lobbying for Monsanto on K Street.

 

New York, New York: Money Never Sleeps

Do you like work? Do you hate sleep? Are you certain you could live on nothing but a steady diet of hundred dollar bills? Move to New York after graduation, assuming your degree was related to business or finance. The Big Apple is expensive as a hooker with three tits, but damn if it isn’t a good place to start your career if you want to be a modern day corporate viking, raiding and pillaging small market cap companies for their precious loot. It’s DC on steroids, much like the majority of its major league baseball players. The opportunities abound here, though not everyone is going to be rich on day one. Theater geeks should probably also take their talents here, but they should not expect a LeBron sized salary when they start out. Just remember, you can live in a closet for a few years to secure a lifetime of vacations in the Hamptons.

 

San Francisco: Tech Mecca

San Francisco, other than being a beautiful city on the California coastline filled with more tens than a sorority national convention, is the place to be if you work in tech. Biotech, computer science, engineering- doesn’t matter. If you know how things work and can apply it, you should probably live here. They’ll pay you a stupid amount of money and provide you the world for it. Rent is enough to make the Monopoly guy search his pockets for spare change, but usually the perks at work will more than make up for it. I mean, they’ll babysit your dog for Christ’s sake. Plus, you have the added bonus of living in California, which we all know you probably need after four to six years studying science and engineering. You didn’t get much sun, did you, Count Dracula? If you have a science degree and any sense, you’re in San Francisco. It’s like Revenge of the Nerds personified in a major US city.