Graduates: Don't Get a 9-5, Do Something Creative

The phrase ‘the best three years of your life’ – in reference to university – is one that students have heard regularly before, during and after their time in higher education. Usually in a reflective, rueful, tone from older people as they look back on a time of freedom and optimism before full-time work destroyed their hopes and dreams. I suspect that 2014’s graduates, too, at some point in the near future will lean back in their office chair and tell the intern about the ‘best years of their lives’. Why do people say ‘the best years of your life’? As if the remaining sixty or so years of your life simply won’t ever compare to three years of dirty pints and luminous green vomit. Work is the reason. The full-time, never fulfilling, cog-in-the-machine drudgery that is work. The transition between university and work is like going to sleep on a fluffy Disney-like cloud and waking up on a wet cardboard-box around the back of Wimpy.