Today’s post will be a short one, but it is something I have been thinking about a lot lately.

Most of us here at Pepetoe are in our early twenties – a crucial stage for “figuring out” our life, our career, what we want to do with it all. I would say at least 75% of us don’t know what we want to do. Surprisingly, most of these people will be those fresh out of university. Nowadays, a lot of young people go to university more for the sake of just going, and when they leave, they don’t go into a job path anywhere near what they studied at uni – although it can be different with MA students, of course.

Unless you study Law, Medicine, Dentistry or anything else with a specific career path (and a guaranteed job) at the end of it, with a degree you could go into pretty much anything. This is the first thing I want you to realise. Just because you studied Biomed Sciences doesn’t mean you can’t go into Finance, or HR, for example. Heck, I studied Languages + Linguistics and now I’m in social media marketing (albeit my current job is heavily focused on German influencer marketing). The point is, you are not tied down by what you chose to study at uni back when you were 17 or so.

It might feel overwhelming when you graduate, with no idea what you are going to do next. My advice here? Favour experience over a well-paying job with a certain career path (managerial roles are those that grad schemes often advertise). Especially if you are in the field of social media and/or marketing! Shop around – remember that although you are trying to find a job, the companies are also hunting down someone to fill that role. And so think of interviews and job applications as a business transaction – you want them but they also need someone.

Getting back to the above point, experience is something that will help you excel, in whatever job field. Employers are caring less and less about degrees, in particular your final grade. They want to see experience – whether small or big internships or whatnot – and they want to see character. With hundreds or thousands of applicants for every role posted on LinkedIn these days, employers don’t want another carbon copy of a uni student.

What if you have no clue what you want to do? At least try. Scroll through jobs on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed (whatever you want to use), and see what takes your fancy. You never know what might come up!

And if then? What if you start a job that you hate and think you’re stuck in that position forever? Remember what I said before, the beauty of living in this day and age is the fact that we can switch up our careers more and better than ever. It is so easy to do – and for good reason. We shouldn’t be held down by one career path that might have been good to us earlier in life, but then we find it doesn’t serve it later down the line. And that’s totally ok. If you start a job, perhaps in Finance, as a graduate, and you really really dislike it, what’s stopping you from leaving? This is a positive thing – you can cross ‘finance’ off your list of potential job paths! Plus, you’ve gained the experience. But the most important thing is that you know one job field that you don’t want to go into – and that’s a start.

It can be frustrating when you just can’t find any job that you like the look of, or worse, you can’t find any in the area you want to or currently live in. When this happens, focus on what you actually want out of your life. Brain dump it. Spend half an hour writing down exactly where you see yourself in 6 months (having found a job), then in a year, then in 5 years. With this clear visual, you can work out, step by step, how to get there. If you need a certain qualification to do the first step, perhaps be a PT, go do it. If you need to get a little bit of money before moving to a big city to start your career, get a part-time job or something similar. As soon as you recognise the big goals, you can start to break them down into much smaller goals.

More questions to ask yourself are things like do you favour a well-paying job over a good workplace/exciting job? Do you want to move cities? Do you have anyone else in your life who you may want to move away with, and how would this affect them? All these questions may seem daunting at first – and that’s a good thing, because being scared means you’re growing, and even means you are getting closer to making this dream reality(!) – but all in time it will start to make sense.

A last note. As hard as it is to block out external pressures from, for example, older (or younger) siblings who may be doing really well in whatever they chose to do, or parents who say things like “we bought a house at your age”, please try to block this out. You are your own, unique person – not a replica of someone else. This is your life, and you will live it how you choose to live it. Your parents and other family members should be there to support you in this crucial changing point in your life. It is kind of like a “quarter life crisis” – but trust me, there’s more feeling this way than not!

Let me know in the comments if you’re in a similar position right now – let’s make a community out of this! <3

P.s. even though when I dropped out of uni I kind of had an idea of what direction I wanted to take my life, I am only one year into this life, and sometimes I panic and think “why the hell am I doing this??” This is completely normal. Don’t give into those self-sabotaging voices that are telling you you’re not good enough, or you’re not worthy of the things you’ve accomplished. Listen to the positive, uplifting voice and I promise bigger and better things will come around <3