Now I Have Graduated And So What Next? Questions of New graduates

Now I Have Graduated And So What Next? Questions of New graduates.  This is the most common question I have heard or better still been hearing or find myself being asked for the past one month. Not only do I find it annoying but at the same time depressing! On the other side I just feel that in people’s mindset you are supposed to figure your whole life out immediately after graduation. I find that ridiculous and at the same time impossible. Coming from someone who doesn’t believe in the word ‘impossible’ may raise eyebrows.

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To begin with, someone once told me that it is only after university that you can really do what you really want to do. Now this may include travelling abroad, taking a gap year, or for some applying for jobs and sometimes not getting anywhere with all those long applications. Whatever you choose to do should be something that you really want to do and not what someone thinks you should do or just following the crowd. Like someone once said, if you follow the crowd, you will get lost in it. This just makes sense as it sounds but what really happens in the real world or what is happening now?

Now, there is no way I will take myself out of this. In  fact I am just putting it as it is. First, I have a lot of fears. First of them is not having a graduate job when am aware some of my mates have secured graduate jobs whilst in university. Well, good luck to them! (After all, that sounds so cool, isn’t it?). But I am quick to ask…Is that really the job they want to wake up to every morning? Or they are just in it for the sake of being employed and as such be quick to eliminate themselves from the pool of unemployed graduates. This is no way to say it is improper to start working after your undergraduate degree. But personally, I don’t like settling for things just because they are perceived as what’s right for me at a time. At this moment, I am still a bit unsettled about my career options and as such I am not tempted to take a 2-year graduate programme offer when I firmly know I want to do something else with my life.

I have had the privilege of talking to quite several people about my career direction and they have mostly said ‘Keep your mind open, try different things and I am sure you will find something that suits you’.

In this context, they were talking about some of the things I mentioned earlier such as taking a gap year, trying our different things among others. Now, it is quite impossible to accept a job offer for a graduate job and then after month you have a change of mind and say ‘Oh, I was trying out new things and this isn’t for me so I don’t want the job anymore.’ That is so unheard of! The point is such job offers come with a specific period and for people who are ready to commit for a couple of years and as such if you aren’t ready for one then why bother applying for the job in the first place?