You graduated. That’s good news! Now what?
The day you collect your first undergraduate diploma, this peculiar and unfamiliar feeling takes over for the first time. Have you felt it already? Freedom. Freedom from obligations, freedom from worries, freedom to choose your own path. For the first time in your 22 or so years you finally have the luxury of not knowing what your next step will be. We start school before we even understand what it’s for, and often continue walking our paths into universities trying to collectively keep up with each other. Year after year we have our lives all planned out: the next year at school, GCSEs, university, until finally we reach the summer after which we don’t know what the next step will be.
Congratulations! You finally have an education your parents have always wished for you. Now you can choose to pursue further studies, you can join the race to the top of your career, you can start a business or travel and volunteer all over the world. You can even choose to do a not brain-intensive job for a while to give your mind a rest, get your thoughts together or just be. It doesn’t matter what you choose: what matters is that you have this unique, maybe once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experiment as your opportunity cost will never again be so low.
I hope my few pieces of advice and encouragement for new graduates will help make the most of the crossroads ahead. Truth be told, I wish I had heard some of them myself before I finished university 4 years ago. Because boy, the following few years may turn out to be the roller coaster ride of your life!
1. Take responsibility for yourself
Don’t be one of these people who blame their misfortunes on others. You know the ones: “I don’t have the right connections”, “the government failed me”, “there aren’t any jobs” and my personal favourite “I sent out a 100 CVs and didn’t get a single call back” (newsflash — they were no good as it’s impossible to create that many quality job applications; sit down, decide on what you want, pick a few jobs and try again). Blaming the government, your university, an employer, the system, and situation is much easier than admitting to yourself that everything is in your hands. After all, in that case you would have to actually do something about it and thus make yourself open to the dreadful confrontation with the truth that you may not be as precious as your family and immediate community made you believe you were.
You may choose to feel scorned by the world and do nothing, but at the end of the day it will be you who will have to live with the consequences of your inaction. Not just verbally admit to yourself, but really get it into your head that you are ultimately responsible for steering your life one way or another, including what job you’ll have, how much you’ll make, and how fast you’ll climb up the career ladder. Grumbling about your unfair circumstances, as much as you may be right about them, will get you nowhere. It’s all down to your actions: if you don’t have sufficient skills, get them; if you hadn’t thought of doing an internship, find one now; and if you can’t afford it, get any job that keeps you afloat and take up volunteering to fill in your skill and experience gaps in the interim.
The time when you could charm employers with a good GPA and a shiny diploma alone are long gone. Everybody has those. The graduates that get the most sought-after jobs have consistently taken an extra step by being involved in their communities, organising and participating in social initiatives, and have proactively looked for all kinds of professional development opportunities. Often at the cost of their own leisure time, they have collected enough skills, experience and references for a stronger career start. Forget all excuses. Understanding that my most successful peers haven’t had any special circumstances and achieved everything from the same starting position as mine has been one of my most empowering realisations to date.
2. Grow some thicker skin
There is this good saying that I like: “the higher you aim, the further you fall”. All of us have high, ambitious dreams, and that is especially true right after graduation. You have pumped yourself up for success by reading dozens of success stories, polishing your GPA, and touching up your CV with brand names. You have it all figured out in your head, yet somehow your hands start trembling when it’s time to apply to *that* job. You know that it takes just one letter along the lines of “unfortunately we have decided not to proceed with your application, thank you for your time, we wish you all the best in your future endeavours” and your entire life’s plan disintegrates like a house of cards, taking your self-confidence along with it.
Having had many career-related conversations with young people I noticed fear to be a frequent obstacle. Fear of rejection takes many forms, such as the fear of not being the first any more if you were used to it at university. Fear of losing your confidence and becoming too afraid to go after your dreams. Fear of your cynic friends making fun of your ambitions and just waiting for their chance to remind you how they were right about your inevitable failure. Don’t let this fear cripple you and rob you of your confidence and ambitions. Don’t let it bottle up your potential and your seemingly naive perseverance to try again and again and again even in the face of setbacks. So what if you fail? Tomorrow is a new day.
I’m sure that the most successful people in your field would confirm that they haven’t gotten to where they are now without their fair share of disappointments. You may find yourself at a time when you will be denied a job after job and will have dozens of rejection letters in your inbox to show for it. Get used to that and don’t take it personally. Every “no” is a hidden “not yet”, so get up, dust yourself off and try again. Who knows, maybe one not too-far-away day you will look back and see that the doors that never opened led you to a different, yet a more fulfilling professional direction. I’m speaking from experience here.
Once you accept the fact that the way you imagined your ideal career trajectory most likely will never happen, you start looking at these unexpected career turns with an adventurous curiosity about where they can lead you.
3. Experiment, experiment and then experiment some more
Don’t take the easiest route and start caking your graduate degrees on top of your undergraduate one. I mean, education is a virtue and go ahead if you’re doing it for the right reasons. However, many young people use further education as an excuse to postpone facing a reality where they can’t lie any more that they don’t have a job just because they are studying. In the entry-level job market a year of experience will win over an additional year of education any day, so if you can’t find a job it’s not because of your lack of another degree. Put that year to good use instead.
We have been taught that as long as we work hard, good things will happen. That is partly true, but you would still need a bit of luck to truly succeed and that pesky thing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. So get out of your comfort zone and start meeting people. Your best friends are inevitably a bit like yourself and during your study years you were mostly surrounded by people with shared interests. And while having a close group of like-minded peers is good for your overall wellbeing, interacting only with them may limit your understanding of what you can ask and expect of yourself. Ever heard of an echo chamber? So travel, shake up your surroundings, join other people’s initiatives, attend events — the more, the merrier — and expand your network. Stories of others have quite a similar effect like your own experiences: they can inspire you for new conquests, they can get you to rethink where you’re heading towards, and they can pleasantly surprise you at how many people are willing to help you on your journey.
The understanding that you don’t know what you don’t know is equal parts intriguing and terrifying. So even if you honestly liked your first internship ever, force yourself to try something else no matter how scary the change would be. Don’t pursue money even if you have been living off pasta and ketchup for the last three years, because a job that you like, the one that inspires you and gets your juices flowing will match that salary in no time. Strive to be happy at your job — graduates often forget this essential element in their race to the top. Now is the unique time when changing directions will cost as little as it ever will, so don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You wouldn’t purchase a car without taking several models out for a spin, so why shouldn’t your career deserve the same treatment?
Chase experiences and use them as a self-discovery tool they are meant to be. If you had already worked in marketing, try finance if only for a few months. If you used to work in finance, try project work. Join some community projects and try yourself in a role you wouldn’t dare to in your day job. If you were always into graphic design but decided to pursue some fancy unrelated degree in the end, maybe there’s a charity that needs a professional looking poster for its new campaign? Hey, it may turn out your old passion hasn’t died out after all. Finally, you can even start working on this idea you’ve had in your head for a while. It may or may not meet its quick end, but at least you realise your development areas before your livelihood depends on it.
Try as many experiences as you can and then — and only then — choose your path. Today, fresh from university, you have unparalleled freedom to decide what to do next. Use it well.
