Post Grad life

Scrolling through Facebook, us graduates cry into our keyboards, seeing posts from newby freshers having a bloody ball in their first few weeks at uni. With this, we also laugh at their complaints - tweeting that their uni schedule is annoying and whinging about what they think is a 'heavy' work load (wait until second and third year my dears). But mostly, we envy them - we want to be reliving those three years from start to finish. We want to be going to our first lecture all over again, taking a stroll round our new city centre and meeting new people who turn out to be best friends (and carers on nights out). 

1) THE dreaded question

 'So what are you doing with yourself now?'. Then you announce you have a job and you can actually see the person you're telling drift off into their own little world. They don't really care what you're doing - unless you're unemployed, and it's then they have 10001 questions to ask you such as: 'what are you applying for?', 'so, what do you want to do?' , 'how long have you been applying for?'. Salt in the wound. They seem to forget they were once in this predicament. Straight out of university,  most of us don't have a clue what direction we are going in and no we are not meant to have our dream, well-paid job yet because THIS IS REAL LIFE and things don't happen like that. 

2) Moving home is a bummer

The sweet taste of freedom and independence drifts away after graduating. Yes we appreciate how cheap it is to live at home, because otherwise we would be scraping to pay the bills on the little money we have. However it definitely comes at a price: 'you came in at 4 last night, I couldn't get back to sleep after the taxi woke me up', 'you've left your tea', 'Made in Chelsea!!?? No I'm not watching this again, I thought you were educated Kates'. 

3) Moving out is also a bummer

We so desperately want our freedom back, to move out again and live a new lifestyle with a new job in a new city. But is this realistic? No. Either your friends from uni live too far away, have boyfriends or also need to live at home to save some pennies. So, you are left wanting to move out - but with no one to live with and not enough money to do so.

4) People suggest 'oh you could get a house share'...

Oh great yeah I can't wait to rewind back to freshers post uni, at 21 years old. I mean living with people who:

 1.Think changing the bin once a month is an achievement.

 2. Aren't really interested in making new friends - they are just stop-outs, who need a place to stay and someone to stay with.

3. Live a completely different life, so it basically feels like you are living alone anyway - just with everyone else's mess.

This is not what I thought the adult life was going to bring. Personally, I lived with the best people ever at uni, they made the hardest times the easiest and laughter filled our rooms from the moment we moved in to the moment we moved out. Thinking about living with anyone else is personally just depressing because they will never live up to my old house mates.

5) Having to pay to stay in a hotel to visit the town you went to uni in

 This is heartbreaking, truly heartbreaking - a sad reminder that I no longer live there and everything has changed. Can't I just go back to my house in Hyde Park and pretend I never moved out? The last time I visited my uni town, I gave the taxi driver my old address. God it was bad enough having to tell him I had given him the wrong address when he pulled up, but then I had to remind myself I don't actually live there anymore. Sad, sad times - along with seeing the new occupants collection of cacti sat on 'my' living room windowsill.

6) Uni feels like it was 3 days ago but we actually graduated 6 months ago 

Sadly, we realise that when our parents told us 'when your grow up, time flies', they were right. This petrifies us more than post-uni life because:

1. We have to admit our parents were right!

 2. We have to admit we are in fact adults, something we do not want to be and never want to accept. 

On the flip side - we are young, we have so much ahead of us, we have so much time time to make mistakes, find the wrong career, find the right career. Society is putting too much pressure on EVERYTHING. Our older pals, our parents, our relatives - they didn't have it all figured out at this age, so we need to stop being afraid that we're currently in this state of post-uni limbo. 

Everyone's experienced this stage once, maybe even a couple of times in their life. So although post-uni life is scary, sometimes lonely, it's also exciting. It makes me personally more ambitious to strive, to want the best but be happy to have it 'ok' at the moment whilst I figure things out. It really is true that things fall into place when you stop thinking about it. We have our degrees now forever, and no one can ever take that away from us. Uni bro's and hoes, we won't be in this situation forever, so when people question whether you have your life together - don't question yourself, question them instead. 

So hats off to finding our career path at our own pace.We will find our way eventually, after all the world is our oyster and we all have plenty of time for trial and error. 

Katie x