Stop worrying about getting a grad job and enjoy what’s left of uni

Keep calm please


The run up to Christmas is truly the most magical time of the year. Autumn fades into winter, drinks get warmer, shaving your legs becomes a distant thing of the past and, after a hectic first term of university, the winter months offer a well-deserved break.

At least, that’s what normally happens.

While first and second years relish the darker nights as an opportunity to get up later and begin pre-drinks earlier, to a third year, winter signals the start of only one thing. Grad job applications.

With deadlines approaching and inspiration yet to strike about future careers, finalists are pushing aside their mulled wine in favour of all nighters in the library, desperately trying to fill in just one more application in the hope that someone will hire them. The realisation that university will not go on forever has finally hit, and it is far scarier than anything we saw at Halloween.

Spot the third year

But where to begin? Long gone are the days where we thought we could simply log onto Milkround once, upload our CVs, and be offered jobs with a £50,000 salary instantly. Instead, we’ve discovered that searching for grad jobs really puts the grad in degrading and have been about as successful job-hunting as a blind man clapping in an attempt to echo-locate his glasses.

Even more worrying is that it seems like all our friends have had grad jobs lined up since September, whereas all we have planned for the foreseeable future is Christmas Day and regular panic attacks about what on earth we’re going to do with our lives.

Forever wishing Milkround would just give me a job

But is this panic really justified?

Okay, the whole point we came to university was to make ourselves more employable and eventually get a job. But in reality, we’re putting far more pressure on ourselves to fall straight out of uni and into a grad job than necessary.

Of course, there are those people that have known what they’ve wanted to do from birth, have spent the majority of their teenage life doing work experience and internships, and subsequently secured a grad job within five seconds of applying. If that’s you then great. But if you don’t know what you want to do with you life quite yet, don’t be scared into applying for grad jobs that you don’t really want, just because you don’t know what else to do.

A cruel reality

Clare Davies, a fourth year, hit the nail on the head when she said: “A lot of people are pressured into getting grad jobs without knowing that’s what they want to do…I’d rather take a gap year to get some experience.”

That is exactly the situation recent graduate, Vicky Holroyd, found herself in last year. While everyone around her was panicking about securing a grad job, Vicky was unsure about which career path she wanted to take.

Rather than going into a grad job searching frenzy, she decided to take a year out and think about what she really wanted to do, and has since become a fully qualified ski instructor. She said: “I now have the opportunity to live and work in fabulous places abroad such as New Zealand and Japan.”

Not a grad job in sight

Not only is panicking about a grad job unnecessary, but it is unhelpful. A recent NUS survey found that for 26 per cent of us graduate employment was a major trigger of mental distress. Is that how you want to spend your final year of university? Crying into an empty Domino’s box about the dwindling job market? No, I thought not.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that we all stop the job search immediately, become ski instructors, and embark on a Narcos Netflix marathon. But before you throw yourself in a desperate panic at any and every grad job advert, take a deep breath.

Having a grad job already lined up would be great, but don’t let your panic about what you’re going to do after uni stop you enjoying your final year.