As someone who is completing a four-year degree, I didn’t quite understand why my friends graduating the year before me were worrying so much about what they were going to do after university.
In fact, after being told by so many graduate friends not to worry about applying for jobs yet, I was surprisingly relaxed in my first semester of final year. However, now that I am in the second semester and nearing the end of my degree, the panic has set in.
With the end of university comes the sense that we should have our lives together, with a job lined up ready to start as soon as we graduate. With the realisation that it is not long until I have to enter the real world, the idea of doing a masters is starting to sound more and more attractive.
Personally, I am ready to leave education and start working, however with the stress of final year work piling up, it leaves very little time to job hunt. And, as everyone knows, it isn’t a case of just applying for your dream job and getting the first one that comes up (rarely anyway!), sometimes you have to lower your career expectations and widen the search criteria to even get an interview in the first place.
This raises the question, is it worth applying for a masters if you have no other plans? At least you would know what you were doing for the next year and would feel somewhat productive; you may even get a better job because of it. But, after weighing up the costs and whether it would be beneficial or not, this just isn’t the way forward for me.
Although I know I don’t have to have my life sorted out yet, and in reality, most people don’t, the panic seems to creep in every now and then and I begin to feel like I’m running out of time. It doesn’t matter how many times people tell you not to worry and to wait until after university to apply for jobs, it is difficult not to worry when you have no immediate plans. And, there is nothing more frustrating than hearing that someone else already has a job lined up!
Not knowing exactly what to do with your life next is scary because we’ve always had the next step sorted out: school, then uni, then… what? This is the first time (after years of education) that the next step is not so clear.
However, as people will annoyingly tell you, things will fall into place and there is no rush to head into the world of work and settle down. We have to remember that we have the rest of our lives to work, so what’s the rush?