The Post-Grad Survival Guide
By: Tom Kuegler
Tags: Culture, Entrepreneurship, College, Millennials, Education

PGSG Submission Guidelines (Updated December 2020 to reflect new clickbait guidelines, Point 5)

Submissions should relate to the following post-grad topics;

Work — Career advice, work advice, job searching, interview techniques, the future of working, leadership etc.

— Career advice, work advice, job searching, interview techniques, the future of working, leadership etc. Freelancing — Freelancing, finding freelance work, entrepreneurship, side hustles etc.

— Freelancing, finding freelance work, entrepreneurship, side hustles etc. Life — ‘Adulting,’ life lessons, etc.

— ‘Adulting,’ life lessons, etc. Money — Finance, budgeting, investing, debt, student loans etc.

2. We LOVE posts that have personal stories, or unique lessons and insights. Better yet, we love stories that can combine the two. We love to see personality come through the story. We want to be inspired. We want to be guided. We want to show post-grads that theyʼre not alone in their struggles. Show us, don’t tell us.

3. What we typically DON’T look for:

Posts that are too broad, general, or don’t directly tie into the post-grad theme. If I can immediately think of a better publication for your words, then so can you.

Stories that have no clear takeaway or insight that the reader can leave with.

that the reader can leave with. We don’t want stories that everyone’s seen before. Ask yourself: Are you offering new insight, a different opinion, or new lessons? If you’re going to tell us to get up at 5am and have a cold shower, you’ll need to add something unique to get our interests.

Please, no stories about Medium. I’ll say it again — no stories about Medium. Whether it’s how much you made in your first month, or lessons learned from writing 100 stories, keep that for somewhere else. This also applies to the topic of writing — we love stories on freelance writing/blogging and how to get started, get clients, or make money from it, but we don’t want to get into the intricacies of writing itself (like overcoming writer’s block, or writing techniques). There are better homes for that type of story.

Whether it’s how much you made in your first month, or lessons learned from writing 100 stories, keep that for somewhere else. This also applies to the topic of writing — we love stories on freelance writing/blogging and how to get started, get clients, or make money from it, but we don’t want to get into the intricacies of writing itself (like overcoming writer’s block, or writing techniques). There are better homes for that type of story. While we don’t want to restrict story length, our preference would be a minimum of 4 minutes read time and above, though we may make exceptions.

and above, though we may make exceptions. We don’t accept poetry submissions.

Plagiarised stories. Rest assured, if we have a suspicion your story is copied from someone else, it will be reported.

4. We accept both drafts and published stories.

5. Clickbait headlines. Medium has released new guidance on clickbait, which we at the Post-Grad will be doing our best to adhere too. The changes are summarized in the four points below:

Is the title trying to exploit a reader’s personal worries, insecurities, or emotional state?

Is the title or story image more provocative than the content of the story merits?

Is the title over-reaching or over-promising with hyperbolic claims or absolutes that are not verifiable?

Is the title withholding important context; misleading the reader; or using cliches, gimmicks, or cheap language?

If you can answer YES to any of these questions, Medium will deem this story clickbait, and not put it forward for futher distribution. For more guidance on this, check out the full article here which dives into each point, as well as Medium’s Distribution Standards.

6. Include a strong feature image. Please make sure image is credited, and that you have the rights to use image (we recommend Unsplash or Pexels, but there are many others out there).

7. We prefer the layout to be formatted as Title / Subtitle / Image, as the following example shows.

8. Please capitalize your titles correctly. We’d like titles to be in Title Case, and subtitles to be in Sentence Case. If you don’t know how to do this this, use a free handy website like this to do it for you.

9. Keep grammatical mistakes to an absolute minimum. If there are too many, we will reject the piece. If you struggle with grammar, why not use a free tool like Grammarly? They even have a browser extension that works in the Medium editor.

10. Use Medium’s formatting features to insert subtitles, pull quotes, add dividers, links, and bold/italics for added flair. Please use the bullet points and number formatting, rather than trying to create your own ‘unique’ way of displaying things. Unless your story is captivating, we don’t want to open up a draft and see long walls of text with no added formatting or creative use of spacing and single lines. A note of caution, though. We also don’t want to see an over formatted, hard to read story. When it comes to formatting your writing, less can be more. Our co-editor wrote about this, which you can read here. Everything is about balance.

11. As Medium is a platform that celebrates words, please don’t over-add images throughout your story.

12. No CTA’s unless they are discrete. In Medium’s own words, “In the story body, all calls-to-action combined are not to exceed 20% of the total story length. This includes crowdfunding links, social links, inline writer bios, links to other stories, allowed first-person promotion, publication promos — everything that’s not the story.” Please note, we will usually add our own CTA, which is compliant with Medium’s standards — 40 words or less.

13. Please don’t dump links to your last 10 articles at the bottom of your submission. These will be removed. You’re welcome to add appropriate article links within the piece itself.

14. Regarding links, we may link out to other Post-Grad pieces within your post, if it feels right to do so.

15. No ads or affiliate links in your article.

16. Though it can take anywhere from 1–7 days to get to your submission, rest assured, one of our editors will leave a note on your submission if it’s being rejected, or if they have any questions and suggestions for improvement. If we haven’t left a note — we haven’t got to you yet! We always try to leave no one waiting longer than 5 days.

17. Please also note, this publication places its focus on quality, not quantity. We are only publishing around 4-5 stories per day. This means that we also have to reject submissions that meet these guidelines for several reasons; we may have published similar stories recently, or are having to be hyper-selective due to high-volume.

18. Finally, we are building an external website, and we may leaving you note asking if we can add your story to the new website. (You can say no, and we won’t be upset). You can find it https://postgradsurvival.guide.

For a visual version of these writing guidelines (though not as up-to-date), watch this.