Post uni life…

Hello,

So I thought I’d do a little post on my experience of life after university. I have found it really hard navigating life post uni when up until now I knew where my life was going. So hopefully this post might make someone else feeling the same feel better!

I graduated back in June 2019 with a 2.1 in History and Sociology from the University of Glasgow. It is now January 2020 and I’m unemployed. I had decided pretty much at the start of my final year that I would move back home. I am very lucky to have a loving and supportive family who said that they would have me back and I am also fortunate to have very close old friends and my boyfriend all close by. These factors combined with the fact that Warrington is bang slap in the middle of Manchester and Liverpool I thought moving home was the best option. I had also lived away for 4 years, 3 in Glasgow and 1 in Copenhagen and whilst I loved being away and living independently, I decided that working full time at home would mean I would save some money.

I left uni in a lot of debt, despite working part time jobs throughout and needed a job ASAP. I ended up working in a sales job which paid amazingly but was soul destroying for a number of different reasons I won’t go in to. I ended up moving home from university and having 2 weeks to settle before starting a full time job (I hadn’t even graduated yet!) In hindsight this was not ideal, whilst I needed the money, I probably needed more time to transition back home rather than adapting to that environment as well as a brand new work setting. I spent June- October working ridiculous shift hours and quickly hating the job I was in. That combined with poor health and a panic attack one morning on route to work I decided to quit. I was lucky that I had now saved enough to be able to live but it was a really hard decision. I immediately felt like a failure and that I was letting everyone down. But a few weeks later after chatting to a few people I realised that it now is the time to chop and change and experiment; I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have children, the only person who is reliant on me is myself.

I quickly learnt to not compare yourself to other people! It is very hard to do this, with social media portraying that everyone else has a better life than you but always remember that this is a snippet of their life which they choose to show. You also have to remember that everyone is in education from the age of 4-18, whilst you do have choices to make which will shape your future, the comparisons between you and other people are small, you may do different subjects or move college but you are all still in education. Once you finish school you are exposed to change again, most people I know went to university but others got full time jobs. When you are at university, especially in the first and second year you are in your own uni bubble, you almost disengage yourself from the outside world, apart from the occasional omg so and so from my year at school is pregnant. It is when you graduate that you start to really compare yourself with others. 

Scottish degrees are 4 years so I already felt like I was a whole year behind most of my home friends! I am born in September which means that I graduated when I was 22 nearly 23 when others had graduated when they were 20/21. Yes it sounds silly but it is hard to not think about age when you feel societal pressures about what you should be achieving in your 20s. Once you learn to ignore them and that everyone is at a different stage in their life, you feel a lot better. I know a lot of people who have gone travelling, I know a few who are married, a few more who have babies, people who are doing masters, people who are undergrads, people with mortgages. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing but yourself.

The problem is I didn’t know what I wanted to do and still don’t! I envy those who have a degree which leads them to a job or have a very clear career path. The bottom line is that humanities degrees don’t lead you to a specific job and in my experience no one really tells you that! Every careers fair I have been to either tell me to do Teach First, join the army or become a graduate manager at Aldi (where I’d get an Audi A4). The careers service don’t give you the tools you need to look for jobs or even advise you which sector of work you want to be in. They also don’t tell you that often ‘graduate jobs’ expect you to have a wealth of professional industry experience as well. The advice I was given just left me confused and overwhelmed.

Whilst my advice is pretty useless since I don’t currently have a job here is some anyway:

• Linkedin is great, the filters for job searching are helpful and you can look at companies directly to see if they are hiring.
• Sales and recruitment jobs are easy money and always want graduates. You don’t have to stay there if you hate it but you might love it!
• Volunteer, you can acquire a huge amount of skills.
• Jobs.ac.uk for any Higher Education jobs.

Anyway I promise the next post will be more uplifting!

Any feedback or others experience is more than welcome!

Katie x