Got a bachelor’s degree. What now?
Any university student knows that late April through until June is a weird limbo of a time. Classes are more casual, assignments come after the dissertation which in our minds is the penultimate blockade until “freedom”. But for many of us it’s time to tuck our tail between our legs, say our goodbyes, and go back to our parents. Those who are lucky will immediate go on to do a Master’s, and those who are even luckier have a job secured and their own place they can return to. I envy the latter.
My experience with Plymouth University has been medium at best, and my experience with Plymouth itself has been dismal. I don’t know what anti-progressive dystopian world we swapped with after the pandemic, but I’d like to get out of it please. I spent a foundation year crippled by anxiety in a flat with eight other people who were all very different personalities, I then had a year of online classes, followed by everyone trying to go back to normal but everything feeling strange and then my final year was so full of strikes it was like it didn’t happen. Friends stopped going to classes, and people stopped caring. All that was in anyone’s minds was: “Get me out.”
The last couple of years’ worth of students have had it unlucky. I believe that some form of compensation should be in order because many of us were simply robbed a proper supportive university experience. I’m pretty sure my cousin repeated her second year because she felt so depraved of an proper university experience. Sure, many of us still drank and gathered, but the learning itself was poor. Subpar, even. Most of the teaching was self-directed study, and it was obvious that many lecturers had been thrown out of whack by the pandemic, or were starry-eyed overly-strict PHD lecturers who tried to make 20+ year olds sit in a circle and spitball ideas, like in secondary school.
Jobs were scarce here, and most of them temporary or seasonal. Most didn’t want students filling the roles. Plymouth was an abrasive city- you could tell if it wanted you out. From the attitudes of the miserable, unexpressive people, to the weather- you could feel it disagreeing with you, like a dodgy egg sandwich. Every day was frustration and discomfort; worrying that I hadn’t done enough research for an essay and balancing that with the fact a grown man had just verbally harassed me for wearing fishnets under my skirt. My lack of luck with securing a job or a flat has been a blessing. I’m thinking now I shouldn’t have tried so hard and stressed out so much about it.
So… not doing a Master’s yet, and not staying in my university town. That leaves me with the third option to take my degree and go back to my family home until I figure out what on earth am I going to do with the next quatre of my life.
Who am I going to meet? What friend groups will come and go next? What experiences will I have? What job will I eventually settle on? What city? I have no clue. I already know which friends are never going to meet with me again, and what unhealthy habits I’ll ditch, and how I’ll keep my bedroom tidy. Little things I’ve learned by living with myself and spending the last 4 years as not just a student, but as an adult learning how to survive. I know which order to do my dishes, I know which cleaning products work best for what, I know how to keep a shower clean and how to keep mold off of things. And now I’ll be going home with all this incredible knowledge… but with a bachelor’s. I think that’s a good start.
