Look at the education system you grew up in. Elementary school, six months of study, then a break. Summer break two months, three months. Winter break a month. From elementary school until you graduate from college, that is the exact pattern: semester, then a long break, and in the break you visit your home, your village. Twenty years of it. It's in your body.
This is not your school. You cannot take a break after you finish. Not one month. Not two. Imagine by February you're supposed to go to market and look for a job. Instead you go to Marrakesh. Somebody goes back to Istanbul for baklava. By the time you come back you've forgotten everything, the world has changed, you're falling behind, and you say oh my God, what am I going to do now.
Think of a bow. You pull. The more you pull back, the more tension you build. For six months, seven months, you've been pulling a giant bow. That's momentum. You're going to hit the target. And this guy, after pulling for seven months, says I want to go on vacation, and lets the string go loose. It takes six months to build that momentum. You cannot go to vacation. You have to hit the target before you go to vacation. This is a pattern of mistake I found in our previous students, and whoever did it, it was very hard to come back.
Class ends. You start applying. How long is the hunt?
Two months, three months. Sometimes five, six. Be realistic about that number before you start, because if your expectation is wrong you're going to get disappointed, and disappointed people stop. It's not because there's no job. It's you quit too soon. So plan for at least a year. Build the momentum, go to market, apply for a thousand jobs, show up to fifteen, twenty interviews, get one offer, then take a week off.
Then day one on the job. You're flying. New company, new people, motivated. Then the first problem, and the feeling changes to: when are they going to find out and fire me? I don't even have an MIT degree. Everybody feels that way. It takes approximately three months to go from that feeling to a different one: why the hell do they pay $120,000 for this? I thought these people were curing cancer. Once you're there, I don't care if you go to Istanbul or Antarctica. But do not fall into the trap of twenty years of education, six months of study, three months of break. Whoever went three months break, they're still on break right now.