Hi friends! I’m sure you never would have guessed this, but the economy’s undergoing a bit of a hiccup at the moment. Some doomsayers are calling it the “Great Recession.” Heck, even the Negative Nancys over at the Associated Press are jumping on the wah-wah wagon: apparently, half of the nation’s graduating class of 2012 will be jobless or underemployed after graduation. Yow.

Now I know on the surface that this may seem like a glass-half-empty scenario, but trust me when I tell you that it never hurts to be optimistic. I have here a bountiful list of uses for a bachelor’s degree, most of which I’m sure the AP Debby Downers didn’t even take into account! For you, my fellow soon-to-be graduates, I will unveil my long-held secrets to post-collegiate success.

14 things to do with your new bachelor’s degree:

1. Spend hours, days, months and weeks sending out résumés, trolling Craigslist and making connections on LinkedIn, only to have your parents inquire as to why you haven’t left the house since graduation.

2. Let your friend’s brother’s girlfriend get you a barista job at the struggling café she co-owns with a retired real estate agent-turned-novelist whose memoir, For Sale By Owner: A Love Story has currently sold five copies on Amazon’s e-book site, two of which were bought by his mother.

3. Donate it to someone whose wall is already covered in fancy degrees; perhaps your doctor or a favorite professor. Ask them if you can arrange the framed degrees into a pentagram, as a point of personal privilege. Then you can sell your soul to academia without all the hassle of PhD work.

4. Two words: paper airplane. I hear diploma-weight cardstock gets the most lift.

5. Create the business model for a Hunger Games-style arena competition, except that nobody dies and the contestants are all graduates with Philosophy degrees. It’ll be like Lucha Libre meets the Roman Senate.

6. Using your highly developed ninja skills, quickly fold your newly acquired degree into the shape of a throwing star and lob it past President Ohle’s face as you walk off of the stage at graduation. This will be more effective if you shout “The sun never sets on the Empire!” at the top of your lungs simultaneously, leaving Jack to wonder what on earth Leitch and Obermiller are teaching these kids.

7. Save it to use as stationary for that incendiary letter you will eventually write to GusLink after they call your sinking-in-student-loans future self for the fifth time asking for a 200 dollar donation to the Annual Fund.

8. Rent out a studio apartment and spend your unemployed days in the buff eating Tostitos and marathoning old TV series, revealing to all that you do, in fact, have a bachelor’s degree.

9. Substitute for a Swedish au pair out on maternity leave.

10. Reread every textbook you still own to see if one of them contains the key to post-collegiate life within its fragile, one-inch margins.

11. Start a bonfire using every term paper and every print copy of course material still left in your notebook, get discovered by your next door neighbor, and make a part-time job out of cleaning ash out of his yard for the summer.

12. Sit and stare at your smart phone, waiting for the “inevitable” email from the boss at the awesome paid internship you had two summers ago.

13. Backpack across Europe for the summer. And by summer I mean two weeks, because that’s when you’ll get sick of being broke and having no idea where anything is.

14. GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND GET ANOTHER DEGREE!