This article is an excerpt from The Best Entry-Level Jobs

If you're about to graduate from college, the best way to answer this question is also the most honest one: I don't know because I'm not a grown-up yet.

Somewhere along the way, people got it into their heads that 22-year-olds should finish school with a clear idea of what they want to do for a living. And nowadays, most parents are worried sick if their children graduate and don't immediately find jobs, find jobs that aren't lucrative, or find jobs that don't sound impressive when they tell other parents about them at cocktail parties.

But how on earth can you possibly know what you want to do with your life when all you've ever done is go to school? Sure, summer jobs help. Internships give you a sense of what the real world is like. But the vast majority of internships aren't substantive and don't last long enough to give you a true feel of what it would be like to work for that company or in that industry for years, decades, or through to retirement.

And consider this: In all likelihood, your first job will have little to do with your last job. Taking a job is not an irreversible trip down a one-way career path. In fact, for many 22-year-olds, the function of a first job is merely to help them figure out what they don't want to do. It's an experiment, almost like picking a major, but in some ways less important. After all, you have much longer than four years to figure out what you want to be when you grow up.

At the end of the day, it is you who is responsible for finding your way into the world, which is as it should be. Through absolutely no fault of your own, however, you probably lack some sense about what's possible beyond what older friends and parents' friends do all day. Even if you treat your trips to the career placement office as if it were an academic course, you still may not find the real-world stories and nitty-gritty details that tell you where the best first jobs are and, more importantly, what makes a first job great.

So that's where we come in.

We had few rules for choosing the jobs featured in the book, The Best Entry-Level Jobs. There were no minimum salaries or geographical requirements or quotas. Our goal was to profile jobs both in the for-profit and non-profit sectors and across numerous industries. We wanted to find places where people were happy, engaged with their work, nicely compensated, well positioned for advancement, getting great preparation for graduate school, doing really interesting stuff, or any combination of these things.

To profile these organizations, we interviewed not only their official representatives, but also, and more importantly, hundreds of the people who were currently holding (or formerly held) the positions we describe. They're the ones who know best what having one of these jobs is like, so we contacted as many of them as we could. In a few cases, the organizations themselves refused to help us contact their workers, but through other means we were able to contact and interview a sufficient number of their entry-level employees to write accurate and balanced profiles of their jobs.

We've excerpted three profiles The Best Entry-Level Jobs: one from a large corporation; one non-profit profile; the final, an extremely non-traditional position without a specific organization or employer. The book contains profiles of seventy jobs from all across the board, covering positions from accounting to community service, from media to politics to technology. It's true that your first job out of college can be a rude awakening. But take heart. It's also true that it doesn't have to be that way.