The disillusionment of post-graduation life no one told me about.
I graduated in 2017. I had my degrees in the bag. I was bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on the world with my toolkit of social justice and knowledge about the way the world really works. I was inspired. Motivated. I was ready to being this new and exciting chapter in my life and then…welp.
I was lucky enough to have a job lined up after graduation. It was a job at a development organisation. A part time gig but it was work nonetheless. I was excited. Five and a half months later, it flopped.
Next thing I knew I was at home everyday, taking two hour naps at 11 AM, watching countless YouTube videos, and spending hours browsing job listing websites looking for something — anything — only to become disenchanted by the fact that my course of study produced little or no results or, that I needed a Masters degree. Maybe my skill set simply wasn’t in demand.
“Am I ever going to find work?” I asked myself.
I felt disillusioned and drained of all inspiration. I lost all the motivation and energy I had only a few months earlier. Did I spend four years working my fingers to the bone for nothing?? My degree felt useless. I felt cheated. I felt lied to and misled, I don’t know by whom specifically. My parents maybe? The university? Mislead by the “system”, maybe? I was incredibly angry. Not to mention dead broke.
Maybe I was the problem? I studied the course I did because I love it. It’s my passion. I started to question my decisions. Maybe if I had studied law or medicine or something in finance I would’ve been earning by now but I would’ve been unhappy, there’s no doubt about that. I had skills, knowledge and passion but no place to showcase what I knew I had.
I wish I was given some sort of heads up about the following:
- Broke life doesn’t end after graduation. It doesn’t even end after your first couple of paychecks (I was naive to buy into this narrative, I know).
- Following your passion is great and I’ll probably always advocate for it but does it pay the bills? I’m yet to find out.
- Having more than one degree to your name doesn’t guarantee anything, quite frankly.
- The knowledge I gained in lectures, readings, tutorials weren’t necessarily transferable into the real working world. This is perhaps the scariest one out of these four points.
It all felt so stupid and I was annoyed at myself for falling for the ‘dream’ of what life was supposed to be life after graduation. It genuinely never occurred to me —obviously as a result of my own ignorance — that my life at that time was ever a possibility. I hadn’t seen this happen in anyone else’s life that I knew. In fact, everyone else was landing cool jobs and buying their first car. That didn’t help either.
Thankfully, my work situation has improved greatly. It’s not perfect but I’m happy with it for now and I’m learning a lot. The future is brighter.
