You are more than your CV

**Beginning university is, as they say, all about being ‘open-minded’. The dizzying new experiences it provides you with means that your eyes are opened to innumerable opportunities – meeting new people, taking up new hobbies, making lifelong friends, enjoying drunken nights and ‘making the most’ of just about everything.**

However, after the original adrenalin, all these conflicting interests can make you a confused rather than well-rounded person – and that’s before you’ve even taken the importance of your degree into account.

Having voices in your ear salivating about last night’s circle at Pop, enthusing about the incredible play they’ve just auditioned for or celebrating their new and important Exec position can make you feel like you’re just not making the most of your opportunity.

Suddenly that relaxing night in that you really needed pales when compared with all the incredible things that you ‘should’ have been doing with that time – which, because you’re young, is time you will ‘never get back again’.

In a fit of paranoia and self-flagellation, most commonly seen at the beginning of term, you eschew everything you have previously done and sign up for everything in sight, be it sailing, debating or dodgeball, because you’re just not interesting enough.

Perhaps it is simply a case of the ubiquitously deadly CV anxiety. Because of the competitiveness in the graduate market, one simply has to have a broad and meaningful set of skills, nurtured and harnessed by the big wide world of university.

But, by the time you’ve somehow managed to squeeze in your day of exotic activities, caught up on the lecture notes you missed, and written your essay at the last minute, you’ve forgotten who you actually are.

By no means should people not try something new – in so many ways, the opportunities at university help you discover things you didn’t know about yourself, helping you to delve into new interests which genuinely captivate you, and to be adventurous.

But it’s often too easy to worry about what everybody else is doing and compare yourselves to them, rather than taking the advice given to you literally – and make university your own personal experience.

And if that means keeping things simple, dedicating yourself to a few select things rather than trying to be Mr/Mrs. Everything, then that is no less admirable than the person who dips in and out of commitments just to tick the ‘well-rounded’ box on the CV.