My degree? It’s just an overpriced swimming certificate…

Congratulations! It’s been a hell of a ride but you’ve done it! You’ve negotiated the potentially hazardous route from undergraduate to graduate, stopping off at the somewhat superfluous graduand on route. What next? Photos outside the arts block, hugs from loved ones and a quick exercise in hat catching before you are flung out into the cold with your BA clutched in your trembling hand and a worrying feeling that a three year old bubble might have just burst.
Then you move back home.

It would be churlish to say that nothing’s changed. You are armed with three years of character-defining experiences, of intellectual rigour and of social development. You are a completely different person to the one who left three years earlier. And let’s not forget the old degree, you’ve definitely got that: there’s a picture of you holding it on the mantelpiece.

Except that isn’t quite true because they don’t have scrolls any more, just certificates like the ones you used to get for swimming, so it’s actually a picture of you holding a roughly cut piece of white, plastic piping with a red bow tied around the middle. It would be glib to imply a symbolic connection between an undergraduate degree and a plastic pipe beyond that of visual similarity, but sometimes, just sometimes, when every single job that you actually want requires experience that you haven’t got because every single job that you want requires experience that you haven’t got because every…well, sometimes you wonder.

However, there is one thing that your arts degree fully qualifies you for, and has provided you with all the experience necessary. Congratulations, I hope you’re ready for post-grad, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Related posts:

1. £83,000 for a degree? It’s possible – but only if you really try…

Tags: Arts Degrees, Graduation, Greg Coughlin, Lazy Students, Postgrad, University