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(ARTICLE) What No One Tells You About Life After Graduation 🎓

Added 2021-05-20 10:55:43 +0000 UTC

Firstly,

This article is not to put anyone off of further education.

I think further education is great as long as you’re doing something which has real value in the world.

It’s just to share things no one will tell you to expect after you graduate.

''We hurry over the road that stretches from childhood to maturity only to discover that its most beautiful scenery escaped our vision.”

It’s really hard.

The initial freedom of post-grad life is overwhelming.

Without the structure of school, schedules, and assignments, people find themselves floundering and procrastinating a lot of the time.

They know what to do with themselves and so they often find themselves alone with nothing and no one, but their thoughts and fears.

No one tells you how lonely it is to leave your friends behind.
No one tells you how much you’ll miss your favourite professors.
No one tells you that maybe, along the way, you had fallen in love with schooling and learning.
No one tells you that it’s important to keep yourself busy during that gap between school and employment or travel or that year you take to volunteer.
No one tells you it’s the only way to keep sane.

Additionally,

after the immediate joy of graduation wears off the reality that you have looming bills and loans to pay and that it was now time to find a job hits hard.

Worst of all, no one in university really prepares you for what the job search is like.

All those courses and internships and hours you spent sitting at those tables with career advisors can’t possibly prepare you for the inevitable heartache and overwhelming pain of rejection after rejection.

The video I made on how to hand rejection

https://youtu.be/nYrvwwGsxpc

Because the truth is, when you’re starting out, it’s really hard to find a job.

And not just a job in your field, but any job.

You lack skills and experience.
You don’t really know how to write a cover letter or interview.
These are skills you can only learn by practicing them in the real world.
So you’ll beat yourself up a lot because you’ll feel like a failure.
You won’t understand why you keep facing rejection.
You won’t understand what you’re doing wrong.

You’ll be angry and bitter and wish you had not wasted years and thousands of £€$ on an education.

You’ll compare yourself to all your friends who seem to have the perfect job at the perfect company while you work at coffee shop, wait tables or bartend every weekend.

You’ll be tired and exhausted and worry about what is going to happen when that first bill comes in the mail.

No one tells you that your first few months out of further education are spent in “survival mode.”

You’re trying to learn how to live again.
You’re learning how to survive as an adult.
It’s a really big, really hard transition to make.
eventually you’ll figure it out. It starts to get better. You get used to your new life outside of school.
You stop being sad so much.
You stop being so angry.
You start to see that going to college was a privilege.

You revalue your education and the experiences you had as a student.

Because the truth is, being an adult is not fresh out of further education isn’t glamorous.

It involves a lot of bills and work responsibilities.
It involves a lengthy commute and boring hour long meetings.
There’s a lot of housekeeping involved and cooking and cleaning and finally a lot of sitting around the house.
You don’t have as much energy or free time and so you don’t see your friends so much anymore.
You don’t spend each weekend getting high and drunk.
Eventually, it becomes a chore to go out.
You don’t want to party.
Instead you want to stay at home and cuddle with your dog or watch Netflix

The truth is that life after graduation can be really, really boring most of the time.

And if you want your life to be interesting and fun you have to work to make it that way.

You have to find the things that make life worth living.

What are you good at doing?

What do you enjoy doing?

What do you do that doesn’t feel like work but is?

What do you do and time just flys by?

You have to explore and be creative.

You have to put your talents to good use.

You have to make a concentrated effort to work for more than what most people are willing to settle for.

The real world is the ultimate classroom.

You don’t realise that you will continue to learn a lot when you’re not in school anymore.

And honestly, no one tells you that you learn more than school could ever teach you.

You learn a lot about yourself.
You learn what makes you happy.
You learn what you’re really good at.
You learn what you’re bad at too and even what you hate.
You learn what issues are important to you.
You learn about dozens of other people.
You learn how to have healthy relationships

Each dead end job and each crappy relationship or friendship teaches you more about what you want and what you don’t want out of life.

At first, you will stumble........ a lot

But with each step you’ll find yourself getting closer and closer to where you’re supposed to be

And most importantly you learn that life is not a staircase or a ladder or a series of perfectly synchronised steps, but a winding road with branches and forks and dead-ends.

Each part of your journey is important.

Each adventure teaches you valuable lessons and each struggle makes you that much stronger.