TO MAKE IT OR BREAK IT

As graduate student Teresa Olsen prepares for her own upcoming graduation this May, she faces a challenge similar to one she faced five years ago when she received her undergraduate degree at Colby College in Maine. Not only was Teresa job searching, but she was also trying to find a way to stay with her partner, Patrick Olsen, who had one year of school left.\nNow, five years later, she and Patrick are married and again face the challenge of finding jobs in the same location.\nWe're both job searching," she says. "It's definitely a challenge. I am looking to go back into career development or judicial affairs at a small liberal arts college back in the Northeast. Patrick is looking to do engineering work. We¡¦re trying to coordinate on timing and location."\nLuckily, Teresa says, she was able to find a position with AmeriCorps Vistas that was affiliated with Colby, meaning she received room and board from Colby and was able to stay there during Patrick's senior year.\n"I got great experience, but not the best salary," she says. "It goes back to what's important. To me, making money is not as important as being close to someone I'm excited to be close to."\nAfter Patrick's graduation, Teresa moved with him to Hanover, N.H., where he received his Master's in engineering management at Dartmouth College. During that time, Teresa held a student affairs job at the college.\nNow, Teresa, who serves as a graduate assistant at the Career Development Center and as a judicial officer in the Office of Student Ethics, is completing her Master's in Higher Education and Student Affairs while Patrick works in Columbus, Ind. Teresa says they hope to find jobs in the same location in New England.\n"It's a challenge for any couple or partnership that's looking to be in one area ... a non-metropolitan area will be a little bit tougher," she says.\nWhile Teresa says it's difficult finding a job close to a partner, she also says it's a great challenge to have because there are some benefits from doing a job search with a partner.\n"For one, you have someone else who is going through many of the same stresses and transitions you are," she says, in an e-mail. "Hopefully those are things you can talk about as a couple and support each other through."\nSenior Melinda Jaffe and her boyfriend, senior Matt Dunn, are experiencing these stresses as they make their difficult, post-graduation decisions. The two, who have been together for a little more than two years, have to decide what to do after graduation this May, and how they¡¦re going to stay together.\nAlthough they love each other and say marriage is a serious option in the future, they say they are making their decisions on what's best for them personally, and not what the other one is doing.\n"You need to do what's best for you, not forgetting to take your partner's opinion into account," Dunn, a psychology major from Roslyn, N.Y., says. "But the individual self matters most."\n"For us, it's the best decision," Jaffe, a speech and hearing sciences major from Skokie, Ill., says. "We know it's the only way we can have a future together."\nJaffe and Dunn say they talked about their decisions a lot, and decided together that they have to do what's best for themselves in order to eventually be together.\nRight now, Jaffe says she is waiting to hear from graduate schools in New York and Chicago. She says she might decide not to go to graduate school, in which case she'll find a job. Dunn says he plans to either go to graduate school for social work at Yeshiva University in New York, which he has been accepted to, or do volunteer work in Israel. Jaffe says she and Dunn probably won't know their plans until June.\nRegardless, they say they are going to stay together. And, they have experience being apart during summer months.\n"I tried to call every night," Dunn says. "We would make visits. We wouldn't be like 'See ya next year.'"\nWhile Jaffe says it's very important for them to be together, she added that it would be unhealthy for them to revolve their lives around each other right now.\n"If we want to get married," she says. "We have to do what's best for our own separate lives in order to be together."\nOn the other hand, many couples, like the Olsen's, try to stay near each other after graduation. In fact, junior Victoria Henry got engaged to her boyfriend of five years during spring break. Currently her fiancé, Doug Schultz, is a junior at Indiana State University.\n"We've dated since the end of our sophomore years of high school," she says. "We went to different high schools and met on a blind date. We've never broken up."\nShe says they decided to give the long distance dating a chance after high school, knowing that it would be very different.\n"It has worked out really well," Henry says. "We have a really good relationship. We talk to each other. I don't question him, he doesn't question me. (Being apart) allows us to hang out with our own friends (and) do our own thing."\nHenry says her plan after graduation in May 2007 is to marry Schultz in June 2007 and then the both hope to go to law school in the same area.\n"We are applying to some of the same (schools), some different," she says. "(We're looking in) areas that have multiple law schools."\nTeresa says that she thinks looking for a job with a partner at one location is beneficial because "you will have a person who you care about, who cares about you and who probably shares some of your interests in your new location. This can help with the transition of being in a new place. And you also have the opportunity to meet new people through both of you."\nHowever, Teresa says she and Patrick would have made their relationship work if they had to be apart after she graduated from Colby.\n"I think it has to be a personal choice for each couple, distance is really difficult," she says. "We'd done distance with study abroad opportunities, but at that point, we'd been together for two years, and we¡¦d done the distance thing and we decided we wanted to be close to each other"