
Isn’t graduation one of the happiest times of your life? I mean, you have worked so hard for it, I know I did. Hello, first class honours.
What about everything else though? Nobody prepares you for the sadness that comes. You have got to say goodbye to your university lifestyle and somehow need to find your new path in life. Which, trust me, isn’t as easy as it seems.
Unless you have managed to find a job you will have no money coming in. Student finances doesn’t exactly offer loans for post-graduation life. If you did manage to save, that money is going to start disappearing and quite quickly too. Reality check: you are finally home after most probably the hardest year of university, and all you want to do is catch up with your friends and family; which costs money. So, you stay at home, alone and bored.
Let’s face the truth of it as well, anyone else under more pressure than a pressure cooker on its highest setting? Please tell me your parents have spent some good time on your case asking about that job, this job and the random one in the local paper? Are you not allowed to have some time off for a little while? And it’s not like you aren’t applying for jobs. It is just that actually finding and then getting a job is much more difficult than lecturers and career advisers at university tell you. Times are also different now compared to when your parents and grandparents were forging their career paths.
Food. Isn’t food just wonderful? Well now that you are in the real world you are going to have to do that thing called “healthy eating.” I never heard of a cleanse before I graduated or fasting. But since leaving university it seems these are the most prominent trends. Living in the world doesn’t only mean having to paying more for Netflix, Amazon and Spotify but changing your diet too, no more Domino’s at 11pm. *Crying*.
The months between graduating and getting my first job were some of the hardest months I have ever had. I personally wish that somebody had told me that it would be that difficult. It sucks that nobody even hints at how much of a failure you are going to feel like. My family was even trying to get me to apply for jobs that I knew I didn’t want, in sectors that I didn’t even like, or know anything about. Of course they meant good by their suggestions, but they just didn’t understand when I said that they were not what I wanted to do for a living.
My advice? Things will be difficult for a while. That is no reflection though on you. You are not a failure. You will one day get the job you always dreamed about. It will happen, just eventually. Things in life are not as simple and straightforward as society has made out. Finding and accepting a job may take a little (or lot) longer than you were initially expecting, but things will happen. And you will be that much more grateful because of it.
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