It’s that time of year again, the weather’s getting colder, and the final years are starting to wonder: What should I do post-graduation?
Unfortunately, there isn’t one right way to answer this question. The final year cohort is so diverse in interests and fields of study that there are many pathways post-grad. To demonstrate how broad the final year’s options are next year, I have interviewed four University of Manchester students.
They were all asked the same questions but gave very different answers, their plans for post-grad intersecting with finance, opportunities, and goals.
Introduce yourself and what you’re studying:
Cara: My name is Cara, and I’m a third-year English Literature student.
Sophie: I’m Sophie, and I’m studying Adult Nursing.
Michael: My name is Michael, and I study English Literature.
Louis: I’m Louis. I’m in my fourth year studying Chemical Engineering with Energy and Environment.
What are your plans post-grad?
Cara: Not certain, but I want to go into something in the arts. I’m planning to do a 3-week internship in London at the minute, which is for a management production company. It wasn’t something I was thinking about doing at all; I was thinking about publishing for so long. So it was really interesting to hear about this as a different job opportunity.
Sophie: So after graduation, my plan is to either look for jobs around Manchester or around Oxford, which is where I live at home. Yeah, look for a newly qualified role in a hospital around Manchester if I can.
Michael: After graduating, I plan to move back home to London and complete a law conversion course.
Louis: I currently have a grad job secured. It’s working as a junior process engineer for Westinghouse Electric Company, which is a nuclear power company. I got a summer placement with them, and then about 3/4 way through that, they offered me a grad job. But before that, I’d like to go travelling somewhere.
How are you preparing for these plans, and what are the difficulties?
Cara: Difficulties would be that I don’t have the dates for my internship, so I don’t feel like it’s set in stone. It’s also just a big uncertainty around what I want to do, and I know I don’t have to be certain, but I would like to have more options. It’s hard hearing everyone talking about staying in Manchester. I’d like to look for jobs here, but financially, I don’t see how I could support that first section of paying for rent and deposit while looking for a job, and I don’t think my parents could support that.
Sophie: I’ve already started looking at jobs on the NHS website and emailing people who can recruit me for jobs and the uni for advice. There’s quite a shortage for newly qualified nursing jobs at the moment, pretty much everywhere in the UK. So this might be a bit of a challenge when applying for jobs, but we’ll see when we get to it.
Michael: At the moment, the application process for a law conversion is not open. However, there are law internships opening called vacation schemes. So, I’m planning to get an internship that I hope will pay for my law conversion, but obviously, that is a challenge because I’d need to get that, and law conversions otherwise cost a lot of money, so it’s not fun. I’ve applied to around 15 so far. You hear a lot about quality over quantity in your applications – I’ve tried to go somewhere down the middle.
Louis: Well, lucky for me, [his grad job] is well paid enough that I’ll be financially okay after uni. But ideally, I’d want to live with my girlfriend, and it would be tricky to do that unless she gets a full-time job as well in a similar area. So, it’s mainly me just supporting her to get a job at the moment.
What advice would you give your second/third year self?
Cara: Do an internship in second year summer! A lot of them are set up for second-year summer. I did have to work part-time, though, to make some money for university, so this wasn’t really an option.
Sophie: I think I’d advise myself to sort of look into the different specialities of nursing, find something that I’m interested in. I know that at the moment I’m interested in gynaecology and sexual health. So it would have been good to figure out what specialty I want to go into at an earlier point.
Michael: I would say… can I go as far back as first year? First year, I would say get thinking. I was lulled into the safety and security of university education. I think it would have been good to get thinking early, so in second year I could have started getting prepared. I did a couple applications last year, but I definitely think I could have and should have done more.
Louis: I would say don’t beat yourself up if you get rejected by loads of places, because it’s a numbers game. You just got to apply to enough places, and you’ll get one eventually. It can make you feel really depressed, but I didn’t get my summer placement until like three months into second semester. So, there’s still plenty of time for things to go right. You just got to back yourself and know that you’ll get somewhere eventually.
How do you feel about graduating?
Cara: Mostly excited. The looming need for a job isn’t totally overpowering. Even if it takes time, I’m open to lots of different opportunities.
Sophie: A bit of a mixture of emotions. I feel excited but also a bit nervous, I’m not ready to not be a student anymore. It is a bit daunting, but I think the idea of having a job and being, you know, a part of something feels exciting. I’m ready for it.
Michael: I am excited to graduate. I’m going into further education after this, so I think I’m just excited to move on to the next step. But, at the same time, I’m not excited by the prospect of moving back home and out of my house at university. So I think it’s exciting and daunting at the same time.
Louis: It’s not great on one hand because you have to be an adult, and I’m gonna miss not having like six weeks every summer to, you know, doss about. But it’s also going to be nice to be financially independent and be able to do more bucket list-type stuff. Yeah, I think I’ll miss just not having many responsibilities. You know, dossing about with your friends all day. But there’s pros and cons.
