Tips for going into final year

[nobuildersplease]

My DD is due to graduate from her degree this time next year and she has started thinking about her life post-university.
She’s the first to graduate in our house - how should she prepare? She’s a bit worried about money and finding a job etc. Is it expected that she would save up some money before graduation to help tide her over if she can’t find a job immediately? What else would you suggest?

I graduated a long long time ago but I would recommend networking as much as possible in the industry that she wants to go into. Get on LinkedIn and start raising her profile.

My DS will be going into his final year. He is spending this summer working to pay off his overdraft and save a bit ready for next year.

Some careers like law the jobs process starts a few years before. If you don't read law you spend this summer and the Autumn of year 3 applying for training contracts for 2 or 3 years ahead - the dates are all on the law firm websites so pretty easy to follow.

Make the most of university careers days and events as good employers often go up to the best universities and she can ask them about potential jobs.

If she wants to do a post grad she may want to think about that - eg my youngest applied in September for a post grad law course he was starts 12 months later - he starts on 7 Sept this year - there is a kind of UCAS process to apply for those courses.

In my last year I applied to 139 firms in London and had 25 interviews before getting first job - I graduated when we had 3 m unemployed - we do not even yet have quite that much this year although we are getting back to it.

DS wrote his CV over Christmas and spent second term applying to graduate jobs mainly using LinkedIn and the uni’s career service a bit. He had around 12 different companies interviewing him and was really pleased to get 4 job offers and he took his favourite out of those. He cancelled a few later interviews. Some were Skype interviews at first, online aptitude tests, some were all day affairs at the company’s offices, some were just a couple of hours.

He had a job sorted by Easter. He was lucky this was last year before Covid, and he had a good degree and relevant summer internships. It took up a lot of second term so he had to be really conscientious about catching up with lectures missed. Lecture capture helps, though. He’s been working there since September and working from home (renting) since March.

Good luck to your DD. She could start getting her CV in order and spend time doing online internships if she can in her area of interest.