Many successful people count the first year after school as a defining moment in their young careers.
for instance,Tesla CEO Elon Musk founded his first company during that time; Stephen King published a short story that would later become a movie; and Sheryl Sandberg learned she wanted to pursue a career in business instead of law.
But while these people enjoyed huge and long lasting success from the moment they left campus, others initially experienced frustration.
For instance, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's first post-grad job ended in failure when he was cut from a Canadian Football League team, and Albert Einstein spent his first two years without any job at all.
As an example of the many directions the road to success can take, we chose to highlight what Oprah Winfrey, Carlos Slim, and 4 other fascinating and successful people did the first year after they left shchool.
Hillary Clinton worked in an Alaska salmon-processing factory.
The William J. Clinton Presidential Library
Bill and Hillary Clinton at Yale Law School, 1972.
Shortly after giving a controversial commencement speech at Wellesley University, the future Secretary of State struck out for Alaska, where she spent a summer washing dishes at Mt. McKinley National Park and working in a salmon-processing factory.
Clinton wrote in her book "Living History" that the salmon processing job required her to "wear knee-high boots and stand in bloody water while removing guts from the salmon with a spoon."
She was ultimately fired for telling one of her supervisors that some of the fish looked bad, but she later joked that the work was great training for her time in Washington.
The following fall she enrolled at Yale Law School, where she met her future husband, Bill.
Sean "Puffy" Combs worked as a talent director at a record label.
Allison Shelley/Getty Images
Combs with Mary J. Blige when he received his honorary degree from Howard University earlier this year.The man who would later be known as Puff Daddy (and P. Diddy, and Diddy) made a bet on his career in 1990 when he dropped out of Howard University to take a full-time talent scouting job at Uptown Records, where he had previously been interning.
In his first post-college job, Combs oversaw the career of Mary J. Blige, and, at age 22, he produced her hit album "What's the 411?"
That same year, Combs signed the young rapper Biggie Smalls, who would later be known as The Notorious B.I.G.
Combs returned to Howard in 2014 to receive an honorary degree and give a commencement speech.
Angela Merkel pursued her PhD in chemistry.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Angela Merkel.
The German chancellor applied to be an assistant professor at an engineering school in East Berlin, but she was rejected after she told the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, that she would not serve as an informant on her coworkers.
Instead, she entered the German Academy of Sciences, where she spent 12 years earning a doctoral degree in quantum chemistry and working as a research associate.
A 2013 Businessweek story notes that the decision proved crucial to Merkel's future career as a politician, given how Stasi ties led to the downfall of fellow East German politician Wolfgang Schnur.
It was also while at the German Academy of Sciences that Merkel first became active in politics and met her second (and current) husband, Joachim Sauer.
Stephen King wrote a short story that was later turned into a movie.
AP Photo/Elise Amendola, file
Stephen King supplemented his writing income by working at an industrial laundry facility.
King earned his teaching certificate shortly after graduating from the University of Maine in 1970, but he couldn't find a job by the time school started that fall.
Instead, he worked at an industrial laundry facility in Maine, supplementing his income with his college girlfriend's student loans and the occasional sale of a short story to a men's magazine.
One of those short stories, "Graveyard Shift," was made into a movie of the same name 20 years later
The following year, King and his girlfriend Tabitha Spruce were married, and King started working as a high school English teacher at the Hampden Academy in Maine. The job paid $6,400 a year.
King quit after two years, when the paperback sale of "Carrie" allowed him to write full time.
Oprah Winfrey was a TV news anchor in Baltimore.
Winfrey was "humiliated" when she was removed from her position as evening news anchor at a Baltimore TV station.
Oprah Winfrey left Tennessee State before graduating to anchor the 6 o'clock news at a Baltimore TV station in 1976. It was there that she met lifelong best friend Gayle King.
It was also a time of extreme difficulty for Winfrey. In 2011, she told The Baltimore Sun she was "humiliated" when she was demoted from the anchor job just seven months after starting — and that she was sexually harassed by disrespectful male coworkers.
But her time at WJZ was not without its silver linings. Winfrey learned the important lesson that she didn't want to be a reporter, and she got her first taste of the job that would make her famous during a five-year stint as co-host of the talk show "People Are Talking."
In 1984, Winfrey left Baltimore for the Windy City to host the half-hour morning talk show "AM Chicago." The program was later extended to an hour and renamed "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
Elon Musk went to graduate school (briefly).
REUTERS/Noah Berger
Elon Musk recognized the web's potential from a young age.
The SpaceX and Tesla CEO enrolled in Stanford University's PhD program for applied physics, but he left after two days to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities on the internet.
Later that year, he and his brother founded Zip2, a startup that sold online business directories and maps to media companies like The New York Times. Musk made $22 million in 1999 when the company was sold to Compaq for more than $300 million.
A year later, Musk's second startup, X.com, acquired the company that would later be known as PayPal.
Albert Einstein was unemployed.
AP Photo
Albert Einstein's professors didn't appreciate his truancy.
Einstein spent his first two years out of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School without a full-time job, in large part because the professors whose classes he cut refused to recommend him for teaching posts.
Though Einstein's degree was for teaching physics and math, his first job came when his friend Marcel Grossmann hooked him up with a clerking job at the Swiss patent office in 1902.
Einstein's father died shortly afterward, thinking that his son was a failure.
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