Like many students, I was fixated on careers in my final year. I had no idea what to do. My graduation photo sums it up well: “Bloody hell,” my fake smile says, “what happens now?”
Last week, Mary Curnock Cook, the head of Ucas, said universities and middle-class parents had become “too fixated” on careers and “in an ideal world, six months out is a good idea”. Looking back on a bittersweet year before I started my master’s, I’m inclined to agree.
I had visited my university’s careers department and decided, in my less-than blissful ignorance, that recruitment might be a good bet. A week after graduation, I had an interview at a recruitment firm in London. My interviewer said I had a spark about me and was interested. I could email him to confirm a second interview in a month’s time if I wanted the job. The only proviso was I cut my hair: short back and sides, like everyone else in the company. I couldn’t afford to take the offer lightly – but was this really the kind of place I wanted to work?
No. Instead, I started waiting tables five minutes away from my parents’ house. It turned out to be the right decision for me. Free from the anxiety-inducing deadlines at university, I was happily saving money and thinking about my next step. The regular shift patterns gave me discipline; a change from my nocturnal sleeping pattern as a student. Talking to customers all the time sharpened my communication skills. You don’t really get that in the university bubble. Strangely, I felt more mature living with my parents.
I also did placements at a music magazine and a national newspaper. I wouldn’t have got them as an undergrad since they took place during university term time. Free from seminars, I could think properly about my future. Off the back of this, I was accepted for a master’s in journalism.
On starting my master’s, I found I wasn’t the only one who had taken a year out. “I felt pressured to get a job, so I tried for jobs in recruitment consultancy and had interviews, but it seemed a waste of my history degree,” says Nicholas Earl, 23, who graduated from Warwick in 2013. “I decided to take time out to think about it. You don’t really have that much time to stop and process things in your life.”
A postgraduate course doesn’t necessarily have to be the answer either. Rory Cartwright, 23, decided to take a job at the campus bar for a year after graduating from the University of York, before settling on a career in accountancy. He says: “In your final year, everyone around you is getting on to grad schemes and you feel peer-pressured into getting something. If you know what you want to do, that’s grand, but some self-reflection after university helped me make sure my decision was the right one.
“Every interview I went to for accountancy, I was asked why I wanted to do it. It helps to be sure.”
A YouGov poll following the Ucas head’s comments showed that 42% believed six months out to be a good idea, with 29% thinking it a bad idea and 29% not knowing. The “don’t know” proportion is perhaps telling: a year out is certainly a risk. But if I’d gone with my first option, I might have landed in the wrong job (with a haircut that doesn’t suit me).
I’m into my final term at uni, which means going through the same rigmarole of job hunting that faced me at undergrad – and yet, I’m happy. This time I have a plan and a passion for my chosen career that didn’t come from some rash final-year decision. No more forced smiles here.
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