Things I wished I'd known before going to University.
- aligeorgia11
- Oct 19, 2020
- 13 min read
Now, of course, please feel free to ignore all of this, but coming from someone who if she could go back and change it, would do it all so differently then I hope this helps a little.
I graduated in 2019 with a BA Hons high 2:1 in Fashion Communication and Promotion, and if you were to ask me what that degree was then I would love to know as for me, it was 3 years of everything being a little all over the place. But anyway we move forward and like I was saying I have a Bachelors degree, so no matter my views on the course or how those 3 years went I can at least say that. Looking back now a year and a half after graduating, in the middle of a pandemic, having started my first post-Uni job, then lost that job and now going on unemployed for over 6 months, I've had a lot of time to think about everything that I've done, and with endless job applications, rejections and not too many interviews I've given the path I took to get here even more thought. If I could go back now and tell 19-year-old Alice what to do I think I would tell her to stop, take a moment and really think about what my options are.
The road I took to get to university was not straight forward, I mean it wasn't really anything interesting but it just wasn't as simple as I know what I want to do and this is what I need to do in order to get there. Like most people who are trudging through college (aged 16-18 mostly in the UK) I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had of course done the change of career paths at least twice a week when I younger and as I started to grow up they stopped involving things that I knew I would never be like a doctor or an astronaut and they started to become things which to me and probably anyone who asked were a little more achievable. I have always thought what my life would have been like if when I was 8 and I knew I wanted to be a doctor and I carried that on right up to actually becoming one, but for me that just wasn't the case. My longest sticking job would probably have to be a child psychologist, out of all the employment ideas I had this was the one that stuck, this was the one that involved me taking psychology as an extra GSCE and really putting time into it.
For 15-year-old Alice, I really thought this was the one that was going to stick. I soon found out in college, roughly around 6 months in that this was NOT what I wanted to do. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with this, to this day apart from the obvious family issues I had experienced as a child I can not pinpoint the start of this want of a career path. Needless to say once that 'dream' was well and truly flushed out of my mind, I was 6 months into a 2 year run at college not having a single idea what I wanted to do. After what I thought was a lot of thinking and some talking to friends and one teacher I thought I had found the perfect example. I was creative and enjoyed it and had always tried to get into fashion. So that was it I would study fashion and go from there. The only issue being is studying fashion is not as easy as it seems. Of course, a multi-billion dollar industry has a wide variety of topics and subjects and options all of which I feel at some point has been turned into a degree or course of some kind. After a variety of applications most of which were not taken seriously by my rather academic tutors I decided that I would apply for LCF - Fashion Journalism, NTU - Fashion Communication & Promotion and Huddersfield - Fashion Communication and Promotion. Soon enough my university journey hit the hard truth that I had no experience or previous knowledge on my applications that I had shown any interest in these topics at all in the past. So my first rejection from LCF and me hating Huddersleid I decided I would take a year out because having my heart set on a course that I didn't really know that much about at NTU and having not really much knowledge if I even wanted to go into this industry I thought it would be best to have a taster, see if this was really what I wanted to do. So welcome to The Fashion Retail Academy and me dipping my toe in the fashion world to see if I liked it enough to study it for 3 years or not.
Now I know what you might be thinking, look she took a year out she did the responsible thing and she took her time and she thought about it all before rushing into it. But sadly for us both, you would be wrong. I thought what I was doing was going to help but instead, it just made me more confused then I was before. I knew after doing the access course that I wanted to do something creative, but yet again I fell into that trap I seem to have been all too good at, at not really looking into what it was that I wanted to do. A big thing that I have found over the years is that I need to experience something before I know I want to do it, or if it is, in fact, something that I think I might even be interested in, and that can be quite hard when you need to work to earn money and endless unpaid internships are not an option, so you're on a constant circle of 'I want to try out things to see what I like so I can look and know what I like but I don't have the time or the money to try out the things I want to try out in order to know if I like them or not' and so then there seems to be a rush of shit what am I going to do before my world falls apart.
Insert going to uni.
For me I knew I wanted to do something creative, at at the time I was heavily focused on fashion; I had done the fashion course and been around people that lived and breathed fashion and I had tried and failed to do the fashion blogging thing, so it seemed like a good fit. So I went and I took my second choice place at NTU to study for a Bachelor's of Art in Fashion Communication and Promotion. This isn't going to be a break down of the course or how it went as that is long and has a few too many confusing ends just for now but I can say that going into a university to study a relatively new degree in a University which now looking back didn't seem to hold the department itself in very high esteem while also preparing myself for the environment which comes with a fashion degree there are a few things I wish I knew then that now I know. And if I'm honest I'm not sure I would have chosen the way that I did. Before the nitty-gritty gets going I will just say this, I enjoyed my time at University and I think it drastically helped shape me into who I am today, there's just a lot to the whole experience.
Take into account what you enjoy and what you are passionate about.
I know that it sounds like the biggest Cliché to say that you need to be passionate about something in order to study it at University but when it comes down to spending 3/4 years of your life learning, studying and writing about something it really does help to have an interest within the topic. I didn't experience it a lot with the creative sector that I tended to be around but of course, we all know about the family of doctors who expect the kids to be doctors, which is fine but the pressure to become or study something that you have no interest in can not just make you miserable but can turn what can be a very enjoyable experience into something that you end up hating.
I knew that I needed to enjoy whatever it was that I decided to study and that was the main reason to taking the year out and doing the course because then that way I could be 110% sure that that was what I wanted to do before I devoted all my time and £27k to the matter. There is no shame in going to university to study something purely because you want to learn more about it or because you know that your passion for it will push you right up until the moment you graduate. Going to University and getting a degree is not only a thing to do in order to get a job in the certain subject that you studied in, but that is also only one option for what I degree can be used for. When it comes to looking at what you enjoy you can be as open-minded or as targeted and specific as you like, do your research and have a think, if you like reading then English might be the course for you, but when you think about the variety of English there is out there, you could choose to fall into anything from English Lit to Journalism to linguistics to studying another language see what is out there that best suits the thing that you enjoy about your interests. For you are going to be living and breathing this every day until you decide to leave or are able to leave and trust me if you don't enjoy it then you're not going to have the drive you need to get you through all university throws at you.
Understand that University + degree does not always = Career path.
Up until quite recently, I thought that education stopped at a degree (unless you chose to do a masters) and then from there you got a job which you got from doing the degree and you worked in that job and had the life you wanted. This reality was a harsh wake-up call when I walked out of that graduation hall and couldn't find a job for 3 months. I did not understand how someone like me who had internships, experience and a degree was not getting hired. I hated myself for being annoyed at other people who didn't go to uni and had chosen a different path who were already further ahead than me, because deep down I still had that idea that a degree was the golden ticket to getting everything I wanted, and realising now that it wasn't, wasn't really something I had thought about before.
Yes, a lot of places now, most job applications, in fact, will say they require you to have a degree in order to apply, but unless you are applying to become a doctor or an engineer where the skill set is learnt in order to perform that job, most companies will just see any degree as enough, however, this is not me saying that degrees which are not skill-specific such as doctors or engineers or maths are wasteful, it is merely a degree is sometimes just a requirement added to a long list of other requirements on the job spec. And like I said before sometimes there are no certain jobs linked to a certain degree, yes if you study journalism you will likely end up in journalism or a similar field but if you study history it doesn't mean you will always become a historian. A job in a certain field does not mean you have to limit yourself to that certain field, just as equally as not having a degree does not mean you cannot learn or gain the experience through other means. University isn't for everyone and sometimes other routes can be just as beneficial to when it comes to jobs later on. Breaking down the idea that a degree is a make or break of a career is something that I wish I had gotten out of my head way before University even popped into it.
There is no shame in taking a year out and thinking about what you want to do. Weigh up ALL your options before you rush into anything.
I think that I'm starting to see a clear theme building with these ideas, and that is just that you do not need to and should not need to rush into anything. I know that my year out didn't really clear my head with what I should be doing and I most definitely didn't go and find myself into some wonderful country somewhere but I wish I had stopped worrying about already being a year older than the 'normal' university age. I was so panicked at starting uni at 19, a year older than the age you're allowed to go to uni, and for some reason, I had inside my head that, that meant I would be behind or not as good or that I was already putting myself behind everyone else when I finally finished and got out into the real world. The truth of the matter is that I wasn't older in my class, there were people who were older than me and younger and no one really cared, and just like getting asked about the degree in job interviews not once has anyone asked why I went a year later or said anything about me be a year behind where I should be, say if I had gone at the normal age or not.
Taking that time out too see what I wanted to do and think about whether the university was the right thing for me was even though in a mix of things I would change would not be one of them. I've said it before and I will say it again, choosing to go to university is no small thing and knowing that you are doing the right thing is the best thing that you can do, and if that means that you go a year or 2 later then you're meant to, then at least you can say you didn't rush into anything.
There is more than likely more out there than you first thought.
One of the biggest things for me looking back now to what I might have done differently would have been to research more. When I was at school and college there wasn't too many options or variety in courses, this, of course, could be done to living in quite a small area, but I certainly didn't know about all the different things that Universities offer in terms of course. And this comes back again to doing something that you have an interest and passion for. Out there, there is more than likely a topic or course which would fit everyone, if everyone was to choose University as part of their plan of course, because there are so many options out there that I'm sure when looking, for one thing, you come across to something completely new altogether. When I was looking for fashion all I knew was that I didn't want to design clothes, that was all I took into he search with me, as I didn't want to or like making clothes and I kind of like writing, was there anything I could do with that? Of course, I found endless amounts of different courses and skills some very specific and some more openminded and wider, seeing as I wasn't sure still what it was I wanted to do I choice open rather than targeted degrees to move forward with, courses that would let me flex throughout to still carry on discovering what I might end up liking. And this is one of the best things about university compared to school or college, you have the freedom to choose exactly what you end up learning about, there is so much out there to choose from, you need to make sure that you research into it. Yet again I hold my hands up and say that there was probably more that I could have done to have found something not so vague, and it would definitely be the first thing on my list of stuff to redo if I could. I would take more time and look and see what there is out there, before deciding on anything
The second part of this one is more focused on what other options there are out there for people who don't want to university. Over lockdown I think I've found the thing that I want to do now, you know my side hustle/interest that I want to turn into and be able to call my full-time job and sadly I don't think it is anything to do with the degree that I spent 3 years gaining, and looking back now I wish that I had known how many alternatives there are out there that I could have been doing which might have helped with this dream of mine. Taking it back to my twisted idea that university is the only thing that would have got me a successful job no I see how many other options there are out there that are just as good if not better for career progression. The biggest thing for me now looking back on my degree and where I am now is that yes I enjoyed my time at university but has it impacted my jobs or even where I see myself going career-wise over the next couple of years... no. It has, in fact, had no impact on what I now want to do and I know that at the time of choosing and taking this degree past me and now me had very different ideas about careers and goals but I wish I had looked into and broken down my own mould of what I needed to do in order to be able to grow skills and experience that didn't involve the university. There are so many options out there that out of all the things that I wish I knew back then, this has got to be the biggest of them all. I wish I had spent more time researching my other options.
I know that I can't go back and change the way in which I did things and if by the time I'm 30 I still haven't found my niche and my ideal job then that is just as fine as finding it when I'm 21 but I do just hope that other people take their time in looking into what is out there at the moment for universities.
I've made a small list of resources which I wish I had when thinking about university and further education, also always make use of career fares and staff and teachers at college who are there to help you with further education and what to do after you leave or want to leave. Another good resource is your local jobcentre, they don't just help unemployed people find work, they have so many resources which are perfect for explaining what help you are entitled to, what schemes there are out there and what would work best for your circumstances.
Some brillinet resources for finding out what's right for you:
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