Graduation: One year down the road
All the gleaming graduates in flowy gowns, all the proud family members, the arches, the red bricks and diplomas — I see you (on Facebook of course), I see you and you are so glorious! It has been a year since my own graduation, and seeing all those fresh graduates, I can’t help but recall that very important moment in my life. I remember how I felt when I was in your shoes. I am not going to talk about graduation day, though, you have already been through it and I bet you wonder what happens next.
It is bound to be a great year for you and quite frankly I am a bit envious of you because the journey is ahead of you. To give you some reassurance and strength for what is ahead, here are the 5 stages of post-graduation struggle I went through.
The ‘Holy shit, what am I going to do next’
By the time of my graduation ceremony, I was already well into that initial stage of post-graduation struggle and the chances are that you have been in it for the last few months as well. In the months leading up to my graduation, I had nights in which I would stare at the ceiling in the dark, my heart pounding, my thoughts racing in horror. And that was after I was all done with dissertation work!
I was tormented by the lack of direction and the fear of the unknown. I had no clear career plan and needless to say no job offers. In fact, I had no clue where in the world I would be in two months. I wasn’t sure if I should be looking for a flat in my university town simply to avoid being homeless after the contract for my student house expires or whether I would be buying a one-way ticket back home to settle for a job in the family business.
Don’t be terrified by this initial post-graduation state of mind, it will pass quickly. Simply give yourself a break, take some time to celebrate your success because you did work hard for it. Soon enough your energy and motivation will spike and you will be ready to dive head first into the next post-graduation stage.
The job hunt
Again, you might have been on and off into the job hunt stage months before your graduation but if you still haven’t got a job offer, the period after graduation is when the job hunt hustle will seriously intensify. Depending on your circumstances you will be faced with different degrees of job hunt hustle. Regardless of circumstances, however, there are certain things everyone looking for a job will go through.
You will spend many many hours writing, rewriting and tweaking your CV, typing in tens of Covering Letters, phoning up recruitment agencies and researching dream employers. You will become an expert on ‘How to answer difficult interview questions’ and you are very likely to read everything there is to read on Glassdoor. You will up your LinkedIn game by writing up a nice little summary on your profile which shows just how skilled and qualified you are and masks just how eager and panicked you are.
That is OK. Everyone starts off that way and you need to remember that the world does need you and whatever skills and knowledge you have to offer it. Keep your cool, set up those job alerts, shape up that CV and put a great smile on your face for the next interview.
The 9 to 5
This stage marks the beginning of a whole new era, I kid you not! You are now employed. If you weren’t sure what this means, it means that you have traded up to 48 hours a week of your time on this beautiful planet in return of things vital to your survival like Tesco pizzas and cider. The transition from student life to working life is a real struggle. There is the realisation that your time is no longer really yours, there is the waking up early Monday to Friday, the commute, the office etiquette, having to buy a whole new wardrobe of ‘grown-up clothes’ and then having to keep those white shirts and blouses in a decent condition. It is a lot to cope with but what I found most difficult in my transition from student life to proper adult life was loneliness and this is especially true if you have to move to a new city or even country for your first graduate job.
Regardless of where you came from, you probably made your student city your home. You met some amazing, interesting, beautiful people who you made great friends with and all those people are now spread around the world and you only have enough time to say ‘hi’ to each other on Facebook every now and then.
You have had new beginnings before. Perhaps you moved to a strange city or even a strange country and have made that place your own home. Surely, making another new place your home wouldn’t be all that difficult? You just need to give yourself some time. The thing is that meeting new people and making friends is a much more demanding task now. Like-minded, suitably-aged people are not easily at your disposal outside the library or at the campus café. Acquaintances now need to be sought out, every social outing carefully planned and considered so that it grants you that precious friend. That is all made a bit more difficult by the fact that you don’t have the free time anymore. You commute to work you come back home too tired to be bothered to shower, put a fresh face of makeup on and hop back on the bus to meet some new people. Is this normal? You are too young to be so tired. Maybe you need to go see your GP and ask for some tests? You forgot that you still haven’t registered with a GP surgery in the new city you moved to 7 months ago. Needs to go on the to do list.
Not only you are not making tons of new friends, but, all of the sudden, all of your old friends have more important things to do than listen to your problems, more important people to care for and more important places to be. This is all normal, people are growing just like you are and you are not going to be synced all the time, they will come back when they are ready. While all this might seem grim, keep your head up, you are in a shiny new place with plenty of gems to be discovered and now you are not on student budget!
The ‘Is this it?!’
This one is hard. It is about managing expectations and persevering through hardship. You graduate with a First Class degree from a Russell Group University and you assume that job offers from large corporations will start flooding your inbox and that the world will be pretty much served to you on a silver platter. Not the case. Absolutely not the case.The reality is that your first job might not be your dream job and very often this is how it could go down.
You jump into the first paying job that was offered to you out of fear of being the person who moves back in with their parents, but it is not what you hoped to do. Your job is mundane and uninspired or too stressful and demanding, or the people you work with are just as uninspired and this can quickly rub off on you if you let it. Here is the key: don’t let it! You wake up at 6 to spend an hour sending out job applications before you go to work. You feel like your ambition and all those years and pounds you spend on getting that precious piece of paper you took a selfie with in front of Students Union just a few months ago are going to waste. You spend a couple of hours in your evening for a couple of weeks to create your own website which you start sending out with your job applications. You feel the need to talk to your parents more often but you are afraid you don’t sound happy enough to speak to them. You tell yourself to be grateful for what you have but promise yourself to do better because you can. You can do so much better! You learn how to be sneaky with your current employer and schedule as many interviews as you can during your lunch hours. Eventually, all the late nights, early mornings and the stressful sneakiness pay off and you land an interview for a position that excites you for a company you feel you will fit in. You are in disbelief when you get the call letting you know that you got the job and that you will be walking into a whole new stage of your life called ‘Having a real job’.
The ‘This is it!’
Look at you! You have come a long way. Just a year ago you were a terrified graduate, questioning their place in the world.
You are now a proud owner of at least one decent suit and fluent in laundry symbols.You are financially independent from your family and somehow manage to get by on a budget you plan yourself. You have added some impressive stuff to your CV, you have started getting a feel of the career that you want for yourself, you have met some great mentors. You know what you want and what you can bring to the world, you look forward to the next stage of your life and you are filled with confidence that you can make it and keep making it. And guess what? It is all the insecurities and fears you had at the beginning that brought you to this place.
This is it!
This is how the first year after graduation went down for me and I can say I have arrived to a happy place. Let me know how you get along!
If you really want to know exactly what was going through my head at the time of my graduation read my Honest Dissertation Acknowledgements.
