How University tricked me into developing employability anxiety
I started my journey in 2012 as an undergraduate student at St Andrews University, reading Management and Psychology. Initially, I applied for general Business Management degrees but liked that St. Andrews offered the ability to add Psychology to the mix as it was my favourite subject at A-Levels, I never wanted to be a psychologist per se. The decision to apply to study Business Management was undoubtedly an attempt to follow in my mother’s footsteps, a successful entrepreneur, as she studied Business Management (about 700 years ago) in a college in London before moving to the US.
I don’t think I considered many alternatives when applying to university, maybe law but it felt too constraining; I even remember answering quite rudely to my school’s career advisor when she suggested that I should apply to read History at the University of Oxford. “History? What can I do in life with History?”
It’s somewhat odd that I didn’t think to ask, “What can I do in life with Business Management?”.
While this practical question didn’t bother me too much when choosing degrees, but the moment I got to university to start a 4-year degree, it was all I could think about.
In St Andrews, there was a big emphasis on Finance and Management Consulting, two respectable and highly competitive career paths. The student body popularised these ideals and tucked in the little town in the borough of Fife in Scotland, the university’s administrators seem to have very little to do with it. Some students naturally aligned with the trend. In the first few weeks of the first term, my friend Anna perfected her resume, practised psychometric interview tests, read the FT and Bloomberg daily, attended a Barclays and Goldman networking event, and applied to as many Spring-Insight Internships as she could. She ended up doing several Spring-Insight internships in 2012, and a summer internship. Anna was not alone on the train to success. These ultra-focused students guided themselves, were smart enough to know that their efforts early on would have maximised their chances of success - and they were right. For those around them, myself included, the relentless ambition was intimidating, being confused (as I was) felt inadequate. I also started resenting the university for the complete lack of career guidance, I was there to expand my horizons, but instead, I felt trapped. Looking at those in their final year in university, all fighting for the same entry-level positions, I could see the future that was awaiting me in four years. It was ambiguous and far too risky for my taste.
I then decided that:
- I needed a degree that would have assured me a job in a specific field.
- I needed to find small employers in that field to avoid competing with thousands of other candidates.
- I needed to be in London, a place where I could have networked to be, at least on that front, ahead of the competition.
So in 2013, I started as a fresh undergraduate at UCL, studying Project Management for Construction (later to become Project Management and Finance) which sounded kind of real estate related, a sector I knew nothing about to be honest. Truth is, I took comfort in the fact that such a degree would have provided me with commercial awareness and a clear direction - not that ambiguity, or uncertainty, that I had felt for so long in St Andrews.
At UCL, I learned about construction and property development, and if I were passionate about these, then my career path would have been straightforward. Needless to say, I wasn’t. I was left to my own devices to try and figure out in which industries and roles outside of property I could have employed the skills and knowledge I gained during my studies. Career advisers only scolded me for my degree choice and gave me a booklet with a list of the UK’s 100 top employers, as if I never heard about Deloitte before.
Browsing on Google to explore potential careers was overwhelming; there was everything and nothing at the same time. Long-winded articles, a decade old, about the best companies to work for (not that hard to guess), which startup was worth over a billion this week, how to dress for an interview, what to write in a cover letter or, even worse, how to set-up a LinkedIn account (as if students needed a workshop to open an account) and - as always - technical papers about blockchain. I opted for the most straightforward solution at the time and stuck with real estate. I figured that if I had continued to a masters degree, I would have had more time to think about my future and better chances of getting a good job.
The top performers of my UCL degree usually went to Cambridge University to do a master’s in Real Estate Finance, and that’s precisely what I did. Looking back, I regret not stopping to think about my options, again. I spent another year studying the real estate industry which I had little interest in when I could have spent it learning how to code or even getting familiar with the tech scene that I ended up being part of.
It was at Cambridge that for the first time I saw the real dangers of going with the flow. Of my friends from St Andrews and UCL, some went on to do a master’s degree like me (the outwardly confused individuals perhaps?), others decided to internship-hop until finding the right employer, but most continued to graduate jobs. What stunned me was that almost all of them left their first job within six months, only a handful stayed in their graduate job for longer than one year - a couple who made the right choice after careful contemplation and a couple who refused to admit failure. Anna was one of the latter, but then again, she worked so hard for four years to get her investment banking job that leaving it would have made all that effort be for nothing. I felt sorry for those who seemed so confident about their career path only to be left disappointed. I related to those who were genuinely confused, even after spending 3–4 years in the best universities.
At Cambridge, the Hunger Games-style competition for the most prestigious graduate positions resumed, this time Blackstone replaced Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, but it was the same story happening again. Once more I was encouraged by the Careers Services to blindly admire those blue-chip companies that were notorious for making you jump hoops and hurdles for the chance to intern or work for them, but I had had enough.
By the time I was graduating from Cambridge, I knew that there was something wrong, something missing, an inefficiency in how we are taught (or not) to decide on a career path.
