The 61 things that will happen in the year after you graduate

It’s happened, you’ve graduated. The diss has been handed in, your uni bedroom is packed away and you took approximately 1,000 pictures in your graduation cap and gown. So now what? Rather than days spent in the library and Monday nights out downing £6 bottles of wine, now you have council tax, a nine to five and potentially moving back in with your parents to contend with.

The year after you graduate is full of things you haven’t experienced in a long time like a functioning sleep schedule and a proper weekend. But it’s also filled with having to book your mates in two months in advance for a catch up pint and sending off endless CVs to jobs you couldn’t care less about.

There are plenty of post graduation life plans. Some people go travelling, others go for a panic masters and many start the grad schemes they spent all of third year hyping up only to find out the corporate world is pretty dire.

Regardless of your plan in life these are the 61 things which will inevitably happen in the year after you graduate:

1. You will move back in with your parents

2. You’ll remember exactly why you went to a uni four hours drive away

3. You’ll spend your day swapping between Indeed, LinkedIn and that CV you keep altering ever so slightly to fit each company you have applied to, with no interest in actually working for

4. The rest of your day will be spent watching Netflix and arguing with your mum about the dishwasher

5. You will Google if it’s too late to apply for a masters (it is)

6. You consider a gap year

7. You start working at the local pub to save up money

8. You’re obvs planning on going to South America to find yourself

9. Your equally unemployed friends come in for cheaper pints and bitch about your friends who have got grad schemes

10. You will join in on the complaining because you’re jealous

11. After two months of pulling pints you realise Chile and Peru just aren’t worth the hassle

12. So you sack the pub job off and get back on the job hunt

13. Your parents will constantly moan about how unemployed you are

14. You accept the first job that gives you an interview despite the fact it’s not paying you enough to do a weekly food shop

15. You start a hybrid working model and on the days you commute in you have never felt tiredness like this

16. At some point you’ll go for after work drinks, fall asleep on your train home and end up in a station in the arse end of nowhere

17. You’ll then pay an absurdly ridiculous price for a taxi home

18. “How was your weekend?” becomes a regularly used phrase

19. You finally understand why everyone moans about the commute so much

20. And you will compare your commute times with your mates

21. You start living for the weekends only to be too broke and too tired to do anything

22. Your relationships with your friends become reduced to FaceTime friendships because you’re all dotted around the country

23. If you do meet up with your friends you’ll endlessly compare salaries

24. And you’ll secretly hate the one making 30k

25. They’ll still want to split the bill though despite ordering the steak and you’re there with a small pizza

26. You will argue with your parents about doing your chores despite the fact that you work eight hour days, don’t they understand how hard it is to work?

27. You will spend endless hours scrolling through Rightmove in the hope of finding a London flat with no mould and under £800 a month in rent (Spoiler alert: there won’t be one)

28. So you and a few of your friends settle on a flat with the least amount of mould and put an offer in

29. Someone else will beat you to it and so you’ll spend the next few weeks in lunch breaks and after work traipsing around flats looking for a semi decent option

30. Eventually you will find one and sign on the dotted line

31. Less than a month later and you are in your zone 2/3 flat with your family firmly at home and the reality of adulthood waiting for you

32. There will be no fairy lights or Sports Direct mugs, this is not a student flat anymore

33. But of course you will be celebrating the move with a big house party, where actual wine glasses will be used and subsequently broken

34. You will spend your weekend nights out in Infernos and Brixton Jamm, thinking they’re the coolest places on Earth (they are not)

35. In your opinion the only pub worth going to is The Ship

36. And whenever you enter a pub you can immediately guess which uni people went to

37. After work drinks are religiously spent in Shoreditch

38. You try to fill your weekends with wholesome activities but really just end up majorly hungover at brunch with the alcohol shakes

39. You become deeply entrenched in your overdraft, who knew bills and food shopping could be so expensive?

40. You join Hinge

41. You go on very average dates with a recruiter, a soft boy and a banker (none of them are good in bed)

42. At the least actual date in the newest bar serving natural wines is a vibe

43. One of your friends will get a partner and you will rarely ever see them apart from birthdays where they are hand in hand with their “soulmate”

44. Your first Christmas out of uni is actually great, with no work to do and a tiny bit of disposable income means you spend the whole week drunk

45. You become weirdly obsessed with the gym, even raving to your friends about your latest workout class

46. If you’re massively sporty you’ll join a netball, hockey or rugby team because you just can’t let that varsity spirit go

47. You start to actually care about having a clean kitchen and unlike uni, you put the bin out before it overflows

48. You will happily spend £6 on a pint but shudder every time you pay £1.50 for washing up liquid

49. That being said, you also moan about the costs of pints in London

50. You spend your entire paycheque in the first two weeks and have to bow your head in shame and ask your parents for a loan

51. Your mum complains you don’t come home enough and uses the fact they gave you money as a way to get you to home

52. You get a Monzo card because everyone else in your office has one

53. You become very attached to your Tesco Clubcard

54. You begin to realise you’re perhaps more addicted to those social cigarettes than you thought

55. It will now take you intense forward planning to schedule in time to see your mates for a drink

56. A proper sleep schedule becomes incredibly important

57. And the idea of going to bed before 10pm fills you with an innate joy

58. You will have a weekly cry in the work loos

59. Before swiftly remembering annual leave is a thing and you can be paid to not work

60. You immediately book a trip to Berlin, Ibiza or Lisbon just to get away from it all

61. After your insanely brilliant trip you return to the monotony of your nine to five, and start to wonder if this is all there is to life?

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