When you study at university as much as the time there is about having fun and gaining worldly experience, it is ultimately about what you are going to do after your degree. You spend 3+ years studying a subject that you love so that you can end up in a career you love after you graduate. Basically, there is a lot of emphasis placed upon the 'after' part of university life but many, myself included, aren't really all that prepared for when the end does come, and it's time to leave university and enter 'the real world'.

The real world hit me like a ton of bricks.

My life until 4 months ago was, as I like to call it, 'pre-adulting', the kind of adulting where you're only half doing it. Yes, I paid rent, did my own food shops and lived independently for three years but I was always somewhat sheltered from the real truth of adult life. My bills were included with the price of my rent, I didn't pay council tax, and every three months I would get a handy sum of money in the form of student finance. So yes, I was adulting, but I also felt like I was living inside a huge school trip where the real world didn't really exist and I was in my own little bubble, which of course I was.

During my third year, there was a lot of talks based around what our options were post-graduation. I went to these talks and promptly decided that I didn't really know where I was going in my life. Not only did this terrify me, but it threw a spanner in that idealistic image I had been clinging onto for three years where I would leave university and magically fall into my ideal career and boom, I was off. I thought that I was going to hit the ground running and be some sort of weird Wonder Woman and would be a billionaire by the time I was 22.

What I did was come home. For me, the hardest part of leaving university was that huge, looming question of 'what do I do now?' Every moment until June 1, 2018, had been carefully structured for me and now I was dropped into the big, wide world and I didn't, and still don't, have a clue what to do next. I haven't experienced that feeling of knowing what it is I want to do with my life and so I feel that I'm in a sort of limbo until that happens.

So, I did what any normal person faced with the prospect of choosing the path their entire life will take does... I took a minimum wage job and buried my head in the sand. And that's where you find me now. I graduated three weeks ago and I am no closer to figuring out where I'm going in my life than the squirrel from Ice Age is of holding on to his acorn.

Friends and family keep trying to tell me that 'something good will come along, you just need to be patient' but the thing is, I'm only human and one of our biggest flaws is that we aren't patient. I am seeing people I went to uni with getting their lives together and embarking on that next adventure that takes them one step closer to their dream career while I eat cereal bars and watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine at midday on a Tuesday. For them, life is going smoothly but I feel that post-graduate life has hit me like a ton of bricks. Now I know I'm not the only one to feel like this, many of my friends are also in the exact situation that I am and similarly don't know what to do or where to turn.

This is the part they don't tell you about at Uni. They make it seem that once you leave you'll become a jet-setting career type who lands their perfect job straight out of uni; and while this may be the case for some, that certainly isn't the case for me. Now I don't want this post to turn into something bleak and miserable because there have certainly been good times since I left uni, but no one talks about the 'oh' moment when you realise uni is over and it's time to be a real adult; one that pays bills and gets frowned at for being drunk at 8pm on a Tuesday while you watch Bake Off and cry into cupcakes. So I'm putting this out there right now; don't expect life after uni to be all rainbows and sunshine and that you'll land your dream job straight away. Things that are worth having are worth fighting for and while I'm still trying to get to grips with my new way of life and while I search for jobs that are connected to my degree I keep trying to tell myself that as a mantra. I didn't work hard for three years to work a minimum wage job forever so I need to make sure I get the life I want. But all I am saying is, be prepared to move back into your old room, and live in your old town while you figure that out because for the majority of people that's the real truth about life after uni.