Finishing University: What To Do When You’re Done
Finishing university can be as terrifying, complicated and difficult as starting it. Finishing your degree is a tremendous step, and there will be a lot more doors open to you than when you started all those years ago. The trick is deciding what door you want to go through and how to start making the decisions that will send you in the right direction. There are a lot of options out there, but first things first: decide what you want to do! Here’s our guide to the options out there and the advantages of each.
When To Start Doing Stuff
Practically, you want to start thinking about where you want your life to head at the start of your third (or last) year. Yes, you’ll be very busy with everything else but you need to try to get ahead and take the bull by the horns as best you can. It’s a lot of work and it’s not great to pile more stuff on top, but if you don’t you could find yourself spending 6 months after you graduate scratching your head and living back with your parents (if you’re lucky enough to have that option).
As you start your last year, your university should be very keen to help you get a job (and by “job”, we mean anything other than “unemployed”) at the end of it all and will host things like graduate fairs and talks to encourage you to get yourself a decent job elsewhere in your degree field. It takes a cynic to realise this isn’t entirely charitable – one of the marks of a good university is the employment rate after graduation, and they want to look good. Whatever the reasons, your university should be very keen to help you find a job, but they won’t be able to hold your hand and set everything up for you – you have to do your own work and research into finding something.
So, the basic answer to “when should I start thinking about life after my degree?” is as soon as humanly possible. The perfect student will have decided where they want to go before they even start their degree. Practically, of course, this isn’t the case. But you see what we mean – start thinking early on, and start doing stuff towards your future at the beginning of your final year. You’ll regret it if you don’t.
What Your Options Are
There are thousands of options for a graduate that aren’t available for someone who has just strolled out of A-Levels. Thousands. But they can be split into two very basic categories; More education or starting real paid work. Of course, there’s some overlap to this. Academics are eventually paid, for example. And many workplaces will take graduates on in training schemes and still pay them. But, in our boiled-down, Coursefindr analogy, there’s two categories. Deal with it.
More Education
More education for most graduates will initially mean a 1-year Master’s course, followed by (if they so choose) a postgraduate course, which will, eventually result in a PhD being awarded. This is certainly exciting stuff, but it isn’t for everyone and only very few graduates from a Bachelor’s course will go on to become a fully-fledged academic. Obvious, we suppose, or we’d have hundreds of doctors running about the place and the title wouldn’t command the respect it does currently.
But further education doesn’t mean you have to follow it all the way up. Often a master’s course will be more than sufficient for almost all of the technical, degree-related jobs that are out there. In a scientific context, for example, a master’s degree will be enough of a certificate to hold almost all of the general “science-y” jobs that are available after graduation – anything higher than that is at best showing off and at worst will make a graduate look like a failed academic.
Other education options to consider after graduation are courses run in certain areas that a graduate might be interested in. Often graduates will develop an interest in something entirely unrelated to the degree they studied – now is the time to finally pursue that, if you have the time and money. If not, then take on a job with your degree and try to gain an extra qualification in your spare time. There are hundreds of educational programmes that are nowhere near as strenuous or time-consuming as a degree, but are still well respected in their specific industries.
Finding A Job
By now, most graduates will be sick and tired of education and debt and the constant pressure of exams and coursework etc. etc. etc. After graduation is when most people start thinking about escaping the dreaming spires of academia and entering the real-life world of work. Fair enough – by now your average student will have spent the last 17-or-so years of their life being taught how to do various stuff – from phonics to 4+4 (8, if anyone was wondering) all the way up to essays on Shakespeare’s effect on the English language and the mechanism for a free-radical homolytic carbocation rearrangement – without ever actually having to use this knowledge outside examinations. By now most people want to roll up their sleeves and start earning some money.
Finding a job as a graduate is much the same deal as it always has been. It’s the painful process of emailing and posting CVs, filling out online forms, advertising yourself on websites like LinkedIn and generally bigging yourself up. The only difference between the process 3 years ago and the process now is that your CVs a fair bit chunkier and has a lot more to it. As such, the places you should be applying to will also have a bit more bite to them. But, as far as the actual application process goes, not much ever changes. It’s sad but it’s true.
So, you’re going to be going through the same old process of tarting yourself up, advertising yourself far and wide, and hoping against hope that eventually someone will be willing to interview you (which we’re sure they will – you’re a graduate, after all – that stands for a lot). After that you’ll go through the company’s interview process and that should – hopefully – be that. The thing to remember at this point when applying for jobs is that you should always keep your options open; just because you have an interview booked for two weeks time doesn’t mean your should stop sending off emails to other companies. Keeping your options open and playing the field is nothing to be ashamed of in the least, and you should be constantly be looking for the best job possible – not just the first one you land.
Remember that you’re a graduate now and you probably should be looking towards starting a grown-up life with your own place to live, in the area you want to live in near/far away enough to your friends/family and apply for jobs accordingly. There’s not much point in applying for a job in Wales if you were hoping to spend your time after university in London, for example. It sounds like good old-fashioned common sense, but you’d be surprised how many graduates just panic and go for every single job they see, without worrying too much if it’s a good fit for them or not.
Our final piece of advice for getting a job after graduation is that a graduate should try to shoot for places with some long-term opportunity. It doesn’t have to be the job that you want to spend the rest of your life doing, but right now it pays to choose a job that will look very good on your CV later. So don’t choose something that pays very well but by most standards looks boring if you have the opportunity to wow someone in an interview room five years later with stories of the most interesting job anyone’s ever had. Remember your life isn’t over when you start work and there’s still plenty of opportunity to improve yourself and make that all-important resume look better and better and better.
Other Options
Here’s where the hippy-ish side of Coursefindr comes in – yes, we know how to rock a wooden pendant. There are a few other options that you may well want to consider before tying yourself down into work or education. Put simply, you’ve spent the last however many years of your life working very, very hard. It may well be time for some kind of holiday. So consider doing the graduate thing and spending a year in Thailand teaching English or move to Berlin and work behind a bar for a couple of years. The big important job can wait if you feel like having some fun and not committing yourself to anything for a while.
Whatever you choose to do, remember it isn’t like you’re going to be tying yourself to anything for the rest of your life. You still have a lot out there to see and do, so although you shouldn’t make these decisions lightly, you don’t need to obsess over them too much either; you’ve still got plenty of time. Have fun, and whatever you do, good luck (not that you’ll need it, you clever person you).