When the book “Quarterlife Crisis” hit store shelves in 2001, it documented a then-unknown phenomenon about the dissatisfaction many “twenty-somethings” have with their lives. Three years later, the book has become a national bestseller, prompting research on the topic and validating the term “quarterlife crisis” as a real transition in young people’s lives, in the same way a mid-life crisis is considered a part of life for people in their 40s and 50s.

ISU students showed they too have anxiety about making the transition from college to the working world when more than 240 people gathered at the Scheman Building on Saturday for “Life 490: Succeeding Beyond A Degree.” Participation in the seminar nearly tripled this year.

Ryan Brown, Senior Class Council president and senior in transportation and logistics, said the information presented at Life 490 should help ease the transition graduating seniors experience after college.

“I just wanted people to have the opportunity to learn and from that learning become more confident about graduating into the real world,” he said.

Abby Wilner, co-author of “Quarterlife Crisis,” flew in from Washington to be the keynote speaker at Life 490. Wilner said the book helped her place a name on the problems she was having and eventually get through them.

“Nothing out there was recognizing this huge transition to adulthood,” she said. “I decided to write [the book] because there was nothing out there like it, and I needed it for myself, to validate what I was experiencing.”

Wilner and co-author Alexandra Robbins interviewed dozens of college graduates, who they collectively refer to as “twenty-somethings,” using their stories as inspiration rather than providing outright advice to readers.

“It was funny because at first when we started to interview people and ask them about their problems adjusting to the real world, they seemed in denial because they didn’t know at that point it was OK that they were struggling,” Wilner said. “After we told them about what we were doing, they were more willing to open up.”

On the job hunt

Like many students, Dan Kline, who graduated from Iowa State in 2003 with an electrical engineering degree, spent the better part of his senior year planning for life after Iowa State.

“I spent a lot of time thinking about post-graduate life, mainly from the job end,” he said. “The job market was not the greatest in the world at the time, and interviews were a little difficult to come by.”

Brown said students who truly want to prepare for graduation should start educating themselves about internships, jobs and finances as early as the beginning of their junior year.

“The better prepared you are, the more successful you’re going to be after school,” he said.

Kline received a formal job offer from Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation in San Francisco the week before he graduated in May 2003. He accepted the offer a week after commencement, searched the Bay area for a place to live in mid-June and officially relocated and started his new job by the first week in July.

“[The company] started me out pretty well, and starting in mid-to-late September they progressively started giving me more responsibility,” he said.

Kline’s job involves testing Pacific Gas’ system to see how it would respond during a power outage. If he finds a weakness in the system, he recommends a solution. The nature of the work keeps Kline on his toes because, as California’s population constantly grows, new problems constantly arise.

There are some things an electrical engineering degree couldn’t teach Kline about the field, he said, including how to work with colleagues ranging from recent college grads to people past retirement age.

“That’s something you just can’t get in college because of the demographic of the population. Everyone’s between 18 and 25, with a few exceptions,” he said.

The procrastination many college students use for papers and tests also doesn’t cut it in the working world, Kline said.

“It’s different when you get out and you have an actual job and you have six different things on your plate with different deadlines and they all have to be moving at a certain pace,” he said. “It’s not like it was a hard thing to learn but for whatever reason that’s something I never really picked up in college.”

1,800 miles apart

For Kline, life since Iowa State has had its highs and lows. He and his fianc‚, Kari Hoefer, junior in art and design, work to lessen the 1,800 miles that separate them with daily phone calls and almost monthly visits back and forth. They got engaged over Christmas break.

“Being this far away from Kari really brought us closer. We appreciate a lot more the time we are together,” Kline said. “I tell her a lot, and it’s the God-honest truth, that if she wasn’t there, I don’t know if I would be able to make it through this.”

Loneliness continues to be Kline’s biggest struggle.

“I was the oldest child so my family was always together. I only lived 20 minutes from my grandparents growing up,” he said. “My parents are married and extremely happy, so to be thrown halfway across the country like that was a surprise.”

Kline spends most of his time at work, so making new friends has been hard. He sometimes socializes with co-workers his age, but most of his spare time is spent alone in his apartment.

“My only contact is over [AOL Instant Messenger] or on the phone,” he said. “My office dynamic isn’t really conducive to making friends and electrical engineers aren’t known as being the most social people anyway. They’re the sit-in-the-cubicle-alone-all-day—and-crunch-numbers kind.”

Although Kline doesn’t have to worry about the average $15,000 in student loans most recent college graduates need to start paying back, the high cost of living on the West Coast forces him to manage his money more than ever.

“In college, I liked to throw my money around. I went out to eat a lot and spent money on things like clothes,” he said. “For me, it was a huge reality to realize that every time I spent $15 or $20 to eat a meal out, that was money I was never going to see again.”

In Ames, Kline and his friends split the $1,000-a-month rent among three or four people. Now, his modest one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in Concorde, a suburb about 20 miles from San Francisco, costs $1,050 a month. Instead of hopping on CyRide ten minutes before class starts, Kline allows an hour to get to work via BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), the Bay area subway.

Planning for the future

A healthy balance between work and outside life will come with time, Kline said.

“Right now I’m fulfilled by my work but not maybe by the rest of my life just because I’m so far away from what historically has been the rest of my life, especially Kari,” he said. “Once Kari and I get married and get settled in, I could see things really picking back up again. Everything is better in life if you have someone to share it with.”

Kline eventually wants to attend graduate school for an MBA or master’s degree in electrical engineering. For now, he said, his job is personally satisfying and, perhaps more importantly, pays the bills.

“I’m fresh out of college, and I’m still learning a lot, so the work is definitely fulfilling, but it’s not 100 percent what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. I enjoy being around people more, so in the long term I see myself in a job that deals a lot more one-on-one with people,” he said.

“I’m open to anything. If a great job offer were to come up in the Midwest, I’d probably jump at it. I just don’t want to dread going to work everyday because I know people that do.”

Of the many struggles the Quarterlife Crisis encompasses, Wilner said, the topics of “finding a career you enjoy and finding a person to spend the rest of your life with” are at the center of most twenty-somethings’ concerns.

“Most people just seemed relieved to know that they weren’t the only ones going through it,” Wilner said. “They need to realize not to worry and not to panic if you don’t have it all figured out, if you don’t have a plan. In fact, there’s probably something wrong with you if you haven’t experiencing anxiety in some form or another.”