My tips for new graduates!

Remember when you were little and you used to say "I can't wait til I'm grown up" and now all of a sudden you're grown up and you've graduated from university and life is strange. Yeah, same. I honestly cannot believe I've been graduated for an entire year! It seems like only yesterday that I was moving in to halls. My advice to anyone starting uni this year: just enjoy every minute of it, because it was the fastest 3 years of my life!

Although it seems like the year has absolutely flown by, when I think about it, a lot of stuff has happened. Stuff that I'm actually proud of. I left uni with next to no experience in what I actually wanted to do, an irrelevant degree and not much going for me to be honest. The first few months (few meaning, like, six) I was waking up most days to a rejection email and it was TOUGH. You kinda start to feel like you're never gonna get a job. I think that's something that university doesn't really prepare you for - how tough it is on the outside world. I don't know about anyone else (maybe I was just ridiculously deluded) but I left university thinking that my degree would give me a bit of an edge, and maybe it did, but not enough to land me the job I wanted. Anyway, I spent the next 7ish months working internships for next to no money and struggling financially but I honestly am so grateful that I had that time to actually LEARN. I learnt so much about the job that I wanted to do, about myself as a person and about the big wide world of work. [You can read about my intern experience here].

Fast forward to right now, I have a full-time (fully paid - hurrah) job doing what I want to do. It's not EXACTLY what I want to do but at the end of the day, I'm only 22 years old so I have plenty of time for my career to grow. AND as of 2 days ago, after four years of financial struggle, I got out of my student overdraft.
So my advice to new graduates would be this:

1) Apply for anything and everything
Obviously, experience is everything. If you have little experience on your CV, apply for internships. It is annoying to be struggling financially, but it's only temporary and it will pay off in the end.

2) Don't give up
I was told this constantly when the rejections were getting me down (see here) and tbh, it got pretty annoying. I was all "EASY FOR YOU TO SAY WHEN YOU HAVE YOUR DREAM JOB SHUT UP" but, like, seriously don't give up. As cliche as it sounds, if you work hard things will work out.

3) Every tiny bit of experience counts
EVERYTHING. If you want to go in to social media (like me) try to build a decent following on your own channels and put them at the bottom of your CV.

4) Be realistic
Speaking from experience, if you're just out of uni with next to no experience and an irrelevant degree - chances are you're not going to get a job at the BBC.


I know a lot of this stuff is pretty obvious but I can't express enough that I've been there. There were times when I felt like utter shit but it worked out in the end just like it will for you. And I'm not there yet, my ultimate goal is to move to a city and work in a big, fast-paced company but I know that I have time for that.

Feel free to comment your graduate stories below, I'd love to read them!