Don't panic! Life continues after college

I am someone who has always struggled to get a sense of what I really want out of life and from engaging with people from a variety of backgrounds and age groups

I am not a member of an exclusive group. Rewind the clock five years; I'm a leaving cert student aspiring to score enough points on a glorified memory test in order to be deemed academic enough to participate in third level education, honestly I didn't have a clue what career path I wanted to go down so I picked reasonably generic course that allowed me to bulls**t my way through the system (See previous articles on the Irish Times student hub here and here).

Fast forward about four-and-a-half years to post final-year college exams and I am fairly confident I’ll be clutching that lucrative overpriced piece of paper come graduation in August, So what next?

There’s always that suffocating anxiety that goes hand in hand with a sense of anti-climax when something that has been such an integral part of your life and routine comes to an uncertain conclusion.

Make sure that you do something that reboots your brain! Hit the panic the button if you have to and get away for a while, after my exams I coached soccer in a few obscure parts of the US thanks to an advertisement I found online while procrastinating over exams.

It was random, completely different to anything I had done before, and most definitely riddled with uncertainty, yet it was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, it managed to fill the depressing void that I would not be returning to college, which for me were the most enjoyable years of my life thus far. It satisfied my curiosity in terms of travelling to a certain extent, and inspired a more relaxed attitude with regards to the ominous and treacherous task of finding graduate employment.

In the early months of 2017 I have managed to overcome that daunting task and I find myself in graduate employment in the heart of Dublin battling to survive and meet the demands of a city that will spit in your face if you don’t have the money or motivation to live there.

Again, all of this breathes uncertainty - is this the line of work I want to be involved in? Do I want to hit the panic button and get away?

I’m honestly not sure, but I am certain that there is a mysterious motivation behind our uncertainty, otherwise 65 per cent of Irish graduates wouldn’t be in employment (HEA Report 2016). Don’t fret over the uncertainty of post college life and don’t be afraid to hit that panic button every now and again.