By Megan Laing

‘What’s the dream?’

I remember the words very clearly; they caught me off guard. I had been at work and chatting away to a customer as I poured their drink. The conversation was light and casual enough that I could carry it on while doing my other tasks. I mentioned that I was about to graduate with an English Literature degree in a couple of weeks.

The question was well-meaning. Clearly, I’m overqualified for working in a bar and the customer assumed that this job was an interlude before the ‘next step’. With an English degree, most people guess that this ‘next step’ is teaching or further study. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered both of these options, especially the prospect of further study. Ultimately, though, I decided that it would not be in my best financial interests to pursue an MA this year.

Entering your final year of university, different iterations of this conversation are had with almost everyone you encounter: family, friends, flatmates, colleagues, academic tutors. Everyone. No two conversations were the same. They flitted between discussing working full-time at the bar, getting a boring office job for a year, travelling, and a master’s degree in English, Film, Creative Writing or Literary Industry Management.

Any one of these I could have easily rushed into without enough thought. But, if I’m being honest, I could’ve also spent the whole year thinking about it and still, I would’ve had no idea how it would feel to not be in full-time education. After all, you start school at four years old and go right through until at least eighteen. Add the optional three years on top of that, and that’s seventeen years I’ve spent in education.

I needed to leap into the next part of my life, but I’ve always been a look-before-you-leap kind of girl.

The ‘What’s Next?’ conversation is a particularly difficult one for many class of 2020, 2021 and 2022 graduates (like myself), who have not only had their dissertation to stress about but also an unprecedented global pandemic. For me, COVID came after a long series of strikes. When we actually switched to online learning, I’d only had one week of in-person teaching that semester anyway. It would be fair to say that I spent the rest of that year and my degree feeling extremely bitter. This is all without mentioning my university’s sham of a ‘supergraduation’.

How could I possibly know what’s next after my degree when I spent the better part of two years not knowing what would happen next week?

Since graduating, I’ve found that I have more stability in my adult life than I did pre-pandemic. I know how to be by myself, which is definitely something I couldn’t do in my first year of uni. Even in my lockdown second year, I found myself clinging to my flatmates and the promise of Friday night boozing in the living room. With this in mind, I have some alternative graduate prospects for myself that go beyond the university system’s statistical measure of success.

Post-graduation, I’m working in a bar. For how long, I don’t know. I have time to go to the gym every day (which I had to stop doing around easter because the workload got too much). I’ve finished more books in the last month than I have since March. I’m writing for me, not for my degree. I’ve even taken up baking again.

While all these things may seem quite trivial and meaningless, I’ve found that my quality of life has improved in spite of my mental health struggles.

I’m redefining my graduate prospects, and I won’t feel bad about it. I will not worry when all my classmates get their first ‘proper’ jobs – good for them. My satisfaction with my minimum wage job doesn’t mean that I’m any less proud of them because they’ve also worked incredibly hard.

Who knows? Maybe I will give into the LinkedIn void and find myself a job where I’m using my degree. Maybe not. My priority for now is myself and that, in itself, is the dream.