“I know people who feel nothing but anxiety about their summer.”

I have failed in my duty as a productive and hyper-efficient Warwick student. Despite being able to look back at a year of many great achievements, I am faced with an empty summer. Many of you will be off roaming exotic and wondrous lands in search of spiritual fulfilment and scenes in need of a good Instagramming. Many of you will be pounding the pavements of the city with the rich and powerful in a dress-rehearsal for your life after graduation. I, on the other hand, will spend two months in Swindon.

Having lived there for over ten years I am confident that there are no great prospects as far as ‘finding myself’ is concerned. Or lucrative connections to be made. And I’m sure that those of you with perfectly planned summers will look upon me with pity. Others may be able to sympathise entirely.

I know a lot of people who feel nothing but anxiety about their summer holiday, and life after graduation in general. There’s a lot of students out there who haven’t a clue what to do with their life, and feel a burning desire to put off any kind of serious consideration until their parents start asking for rent.

It’s easy to sit back and look at your more productive peers and think “good for them, but they’ve obviously got it sorted”. But I suspect that this is inaccurate. I suspect that these are the people who are simply bold enough to try and make some headway in some direction. Any direction. And lucky enough to have found a pre-packaged and good-to-go character building opportunity.

So what then for the rest of us? Well I think that now is the perfect opportunity to get out there and make something of yourself. See a gap in a local market? Try and fill it. Think you could create something truly worth doing? Then do it. What’s the worst that could happen as a result? We’re in a very privileged position by being intelligent and creative enough to even attend this university. Add in some ambition and who is to say that great things can’t be done?

I’ve got two months to turn the (very) blank canvas of Swindon in to something. It doesn’t have to be good, but it has to be something. And my terror at this prospect is matched only by my determination. This commonly held notion that one’s twenties are to be spend faffing about without making progress is wrong. Our twenties are to be spent making progress with our faffing about.

Granted, you’re not going to figure out how to spend the next 40 years in the nine to five grind, but it’s the only time you can build a statue of Mark Wahlberg out of toilet paper and chewing gum and consider it time well spent.