Kirstie Nicols is working in sales - but with hopes of getting into journalism. Uni forever For the first time in 18 years, my little sister left this week to try her luck at living independently while getting a degree; something I hope she manages to accomplish a little better than I did!
She is determined to prove wrong all my horror stories about having to live off 9p noodles from Tesco’s for the last few weeks of term, and being forced to go without sleep for 48 hours straight, in order to start and finish a 5,000-word paper. She had also assured me that it must be physically impossible to drink as much and as often as I said I did; so of course she won’t be doing the same, and will instead turn up to all the 9.00am lectures without fail. Oh how I pity the innocent… Apart from the fact that talking about my experiences of uni life (such as the almost God-like quality of pasta and Pro Plus that comes to light) managed to make me feel old, it also gave me the insane urge to quit the job and the job hunt, and retake my entire degree. I even went so far as to have a look on my old uni’s website to see what courses they were offering nowadays (of course I refuse to look anywhere else; I have developed that strange kind of patriotism that tells me my uni is better than all others, at all courses). This is a feeling I have experienced many times since leaving; usually in the mornings after getting up at 7.30, a time I didn’t have to see for three years. A shockI remember the conversations me and my friends had as we reached the final weeks of the final year. It was about the time when exam revision was starting to get in the way of the normal mid-morning nap; so we were probably all a little irritable at not having had the full 12 hours sleep we needed. We were fed up of uni; all those classes they made you go to and the work they made you do. We’d all been pretty much penniless for three years (although there was always money available for a night out) and were looking forward to earning a wage and being able to buy anything we wanted. Mainly, however, I think it was mum’s home cooking that we all missed most. None of us actually envisaged that getting a job and going to work meant that someone would actually be expecting us to do some work. We all just wanted to start off with an easy 9 to 5, where we could head home at the end of the day and not have to think about having to write an essay or prepare a presentation. I think we all saw having a job as an escape from the responsibility of making sure we met essay deadlines, when we would no longer need to worry about what needed to be done the next day. It came as a bit of shock, therefore, to realise that although we no longer had to write essays, we were still worrying about what work needed to be done. Except now we start at 9 and don’t finish for eight hours. A year laterHowever, over the past year, I’ve slowly and grudgingly started to see the positive side to work, and realised that although hindsight is a wonderful thing, it tends to allow you to forget all the negative. As much as I’d love to go back and do it all over again, I don’t really think I fancy having to start at the beginning once more. And even though I miss waking up at midday to find a traffic cone in the corner of the room and no recollection of the night before, I think I’d miss the office gossip and the way everyone looks forward to Friday’s drink in the pub just as much. I’ve spoken to friends who graduated a year or two before me, and are ahead of me in attaining their ideal career. They all assure me that now they’re doing something they want to do that makes them happy, they’re having just as good a time as they remember having at uni (minus the traffic cones). When I think about it, I don’t hate my job; I don’t hate getting to work everyday; and I certainly don’t hate earning a wage. My ‘rose-tinted spectacles’ condition is just telling me that I’ve only just started my career path and I’ve got a while to go yet. Read Kirstie's previous blogs If you would like to become a Prospects blogger and you left uni either this year or in 2006, please make contact. | 
