It’s over. 

Three years of late nights, last minute assignment submissions and multiple breakdowns resulting in the threat to drop out, but I finally did it. I graduated. 

Even though this is what I had been waiting for this entire time, like a shining beacon of hope throughout it all, now I would give anything to go back to my first day. A once fresh and eager student, now I’m a lost graduate, wondering what the hell I’m going to do now. 

First and foremost, and maybe it’s just me, but graduation day was not “one of the most special days of my life” as many people told me it would be. Yes, I got to put on a nice dress and doll myself up, but as for the ceremony itself, the best way I can describe it would be anticlimactic. Again, maybe this is just me, and maybe it doesn’t help that in my three years of university I never made the effort to make friends in my course, so there was no crying and hugging my peers with the fear that we may never cross paths again. 

Let me break down my experience for you. I arrived at the Barbican Centre at 1 pm where I met my parents. 20 minutes later they abandoned me to find their seats and I had to awkwardly look around for literally anyone I knew (which thankfully I did find). 

After this, we began to make our way to our designated seats, and then wait half an hour for the ceremony itself to start. I was sitting beside people I had never seen before, so I had to pretend to be unbothered and scroll on my phone even though I had no reception. 

As for the ceremony itself, as I said earlier, anticlimactic. Yeah, it’s nice and all, a ceremony to celebrate my and my peers’ achievements, but how thrilling is it really to sit through two hours of speeches and whatnot just to walk across a stage and collect a piece of paper with a grade on it that I already knew. Would I do it again? Of course. Was it the best day of my life that made the last three years of my life worth it? No. 

As I’m writing this it has now been three days since I graduated and all I’m feeling is fear. I think this is common among most, but it’s not something you really think about before the time comes. Instead of celebrating, I’ve been frantically applying for jobs I don’t really want to do, updating my LinkedIn, and stressing over the fact that I might be wasting my life and that my degree is actually worth nothing as I don’t have 3 years’ experience in any of the fields I’m interested in. 

My uni experience has been slightly different to most. Instead of the typical ‘uni straight after A-Levels route’, I took a bit of a detour. When the time came to apply for UCAS, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I had initially wanted to become a physiotherapist, but I ended up dropping biology after my AS exams. In the end I decided not to apply at all. As it got closer to the end of the year, I decided to apply for a fast-track A Level Biology course that would mean I could then go to study physiotherapy the following year. All was going well, and I received a conditional offer from a top Russell Group university. However, this was in 2020, and as I never actually got to sit my exams, my predicted grades were not enough, and again my physiotherapy dreams didn’t work out. 

I should have taken this as a sign from the universe that this path was not for me, but I didn’t give up. Instead, I called up my old high school and asked if I could sit my biology exams there the following summer as I still had all my university offers provided I sat the exams. I was now onto my second gap year and spent this time working and studying for my upcoming exams, and slowly slipping into a state of depression. By the time exam season began to roll around, I gave up. In reality, I didn’t really want to be a physiotherapist, I just knew that this offered me a clear career path and a stable job that would make my parents proud, but it just wasn’t something I was actually passionate about. I had always been creative, and English was my favourite subject, but what was I going to do with an English degree, other than become a teacher? 

I decided to take the risk. I had one space left on my UCAS application and a few weeks left to still apply for universities. My brother was living in London at the time, and to a young girl who grew up in rural Ireland and always dreamed of living like Carrie Bradshaw in NYC, this was the next best thing. My mindset at the time was, well even if English was a useless degree, at least I’d be doing it in London. 

Not too long afterwards, I received my unconditional offer to study English that coming September. I told my parents, who were initially far from impressed. What about physiotherapy? All the time and money gone to waste. I began to think I was making a mistake and should just suck it up and sit those exams. Like I said, what good is an English degree anyway? 

Obviously, I didn’t do that, in case you couldn’t tell. I moved to London at the end of August 2021. My parents came around and they were honestly just happy I was finally doing something with my life. 

This diversion had its pros and cons. If I went to uni straight after A-Levels I probably would have dropped out. If I had gone on to study physiotherapy I probably would have been miserable. I ended up loving my course and the university, and I met so many great people I would have never ended up meeting if things had worked out differently. But, like I said, there are cons. I’m now 23 and all my friends have completed their degrees, and their masters, and now have ‘real’ jobs, whereas I’m still working as a bartender and wondering when I’m finally gonna get it together. 

Before I graduated, I had a safety net. I was a student. Yes, I was older and most people my age have their life together, or so it seems like, but at least I could say I was still studying. Now I no longer have that. Now, I’m attending talks from companies that promise to help you become a writer but in reality, they just want you to pay for their masterclass which will tell me the same things as a quick Google search on ‘how to get a job in copywriting’.  

Yet despite my anxieties towards the future, do I regret anything? No. Graduating may be hard, and things may seem difficult, but one thing I’ve learnt recently is that everyone feels this way. Even though I think my peers have it all together, they don’t. I don’t think anyone in their 20’s does. The real world is tough and confusing, and sometimes I just want to give up and move home to my parents, but I just have to remind myself that it’s okay to be lost and not know what direction your life is headed. And in some ways, that’s a beautiful thing. I felt the same way when my original plans didn’t work out, but things ended up better than if they had. These past three years in London have taught me a lot, the most important thing being you never know what to expect. I don’t know what the future holds, and while that’s scary, it’s also the most exciting thing ever.