24th April 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
As with most other recent university graduates, I have come out into the big bad real world complete with £50,000 of debt and a desperate need for a paying job. However, while we graduates must understand that a degree won’t single-handedly provide is with our dream job, it will give us the opportunity we need in order to realise it more easily.
Upon leaving those library walls, the safe haven of academic exploration, graduates are thrown unceremoniously out of the university bubble that has provided them with money, entertainment and educational pursuits for three years. Landing on your feet is one thing, but your parents are unlikely to allow you to live rent free, surviving on their chocolate biscuit welfare now that you have a degree. Now comes the joyous sending out of applications followed by polite rejections and frosty silence.
University critics are quick to pounce on unemployed graduates as a sign that degrees are worthless and a waste of money. However, here they seem to be missing the obvious point: that even for those with the best qualifications, the graduate job market is an unbelievably tough place to start out in. No graduate can afford to be complacent and must do everything they can in order to bag that dream job, including working from the bottoms up.
While currently it may seem fashionable to dismiss a university education as a total waste of the government’s money, those applying to university should ignore these foolish comments and apply in the knowledge that even a graduate must work to their utmost when setting out on their career path. We should not forget that, for most jobs, a degree is a prerequisite for those jobs that offer invaluable experience or an opportunity for progression.