Careers: And then second year ends…

Largely, the extent to which you’re pressured to think about your future during your time at University depends on the people you surround yourself with. Your friends, flatmates, and even the stranger you share a heart-to- heart with over a pitcher of Eliminator can all shape your idea of the big bad world of employment waiting beyond the Warwick bubble.

But the bubble itself is partly to blame for the sense that ‘career’ is somehow a dirty word – alongside ‘graduation’, there are few ideas more terrifying for a student to consider. For the most part, we spend the first year or two of our degrees pretending that these halcyon days of day- drinking and eternal lie-ins will never end. Suddenly, second year ends, and it seems that everyone you’ve ever met has bagged 14 Assessment Centres, half a dozen interviews, and a 10-week, £20,000 internship over the summer.

I exaggerate, of course, but these are the people who stick out the most, and whose shining example of all that is maturity and adulthood is frankly blinding to the rest of us, still recovering from an unwise mid-week eliminator. These are the stories you tell to all your equally unemployable friends: “Did you hear about [insert name of functional human here]? They’ve got a grad job lined up as next in line to the throne!”

Suddenly, second year ends, and it seems that everyone you’ve ever met has bagged 14 Assessment Centres, half a dozen interviews, and a 10-week, £20,000 internship over the summer

On a campus like Warwick, where the bubble is all-seeing and all knowing, these stories are haunting if you don’t have a concrete plan post-graduation. But it’s important to remember that these individual stories are far from being the whole story.

Your friend living a trendy new lifestyle financed by their dream job is likely to be much more vocal about it than your other friend taking a few months out to take stock after finishing uni, or the old flat-mate who’s moved home and is working in a shop to save up for whatever comes next. And the nature of the bubble is such that you immediately compare yourself not to the people who may be taking time to recover from what is unarguably one of the toughest experiences of many of our lives, but to the person who had landed on their feet before they’d even finished their course.

Your friend living a trendy new lifestyle financed by their dream job is likely to be much more vocal about it than your other friend taking a few months out to take stock after finishing uni

At Warwick, opportunities exist both within departments and across the wider university to help guide you to what’s best for you. But these services are under-utilised by many who often understand the idea of having a job as soon as possible after graduation to be more important than being happy doing something that allows them to build a long-term career.

For many, grad schemes and corporate jobs are the ideal path to a secure future. But the pressure that applies to those of us for whom this is not the case comes from an inability to see the world outside the bubble, and so the pressure to have a whole career planned out often comes from within. Learning to see the world of other opportunities that lie beyond Warwick is, for many, the first step to alleviating that pressure and developing a future that works for them.