Indigo Editor’s Blog – 735
by Rachel Aroesti
It’s my favourite question – everyone else’s least. But it’s seasonal, so I’m going to ask it. What are you going to do after you graduate? Hearing my friends discuss how the PWC interview day went, or the technicalities of applying for a Masters, fascinates me. How do they know when the deadline for the Civil Service is?! How do they find the time to fill in a hundred-page form about leadership qualities? When the question is posed to me I just make an I-don’t-know-but-I’m bloody-terrified-look and say “Goddd I have NO idea!” But my reaction is a lie. I do have an idea – at least of what I don’t want.
Deadlines for grad schemes and internships roll past (I’ve heard) only making me feel calmer and calmer, still without having recounted a time when I have demonstrated leadership qualities. I know I don’t want to do a Masters (can’t handle another year feeling crap about the amount of procrastination I do), don’t want to do law (and applaud those choosing a life of really, really hard work. Well done!), and working in a bank sounds just a tiny bit boring (or am I missing something?)
Yes that’s right, I haven’t applied for any jobs. My plans for the latter half of 2012 include daytime TV, Facebook chat and crippling depression!
Oh god, why haven’t I got a plan?! Shamefully, I think I have identified the reason – it’s because I have been very lucky so far, and I’m finding it hard to envisage the inevitable future where things don’t go my way. An impromptu gap-year (prompted actually by a computer screen full of UCAS rejections) led me to actually being paid to work in TV.
When my graduated friends tell me sheepishly they are going into accounting or law, I am disappointed, I can’t hide it. But it’s only because I desperately want them take risks, do a job that they would happily pay to do (and practically will) and set the path for an interesting and exciting career. The arrogance, of course, in suggesting that their career won’t be as exciting as mine, doesn’t escape me, but it’s more that they seem to be making their life-choices in grim resignation rather than burning passion.
Behaving as arrogantly as I am, though, feels like I am skating on very thin ice. I should probably start working out just how far into the middle I am, whether I can get back to the dry land of proper-job possibilities that I started from. But at the moment I’m trying to convince myself that it’s already too late, so I have no choice but to make a dash for the other side. RA
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