The Future – Beth Thomas

Post-Grad Blues

I read a wonderful article in the Metro recently about post-graduate depression, a subject that has been on my mind quite a lot recently. A few things have contributed to the nostalgia I’ve been feeling, from seeing younger students move into their campus accommodation, to reading about the university experiences of celebrities in their biographies.

DISCLAIMER: I’m lucky enough to not suffer from depression, but the post-uni blues have been hitting me hard this past week. A year ago, I would have been stocking up on things to take to my student house, frantically trying to ‘get ahead’ with reading (i.e. reading the first ten pages of one set text), and spending as much time as I could with the family and in the city that I love.

I keep finding myself lapsing into the old, familiar feeling of starting a new educational year. I think that’s pretty fair – I have, after all, spent seventeen Septembers preparing myself for school. Needless to say then, it’s been a bit of a shock to my system not to have to buy new stationary, uniform, or overpriced books.

Leaving university feels the same as those books that abruptly end. You get to the final page and think, “What? That’s it?”, just as things were getting good, and the shock that there are no more pages leaves you feeling disappointed. As corny as tenuous as this metaphor is, it pretty much sums up how I – and probably many other graduates – currently feel.

I spent most of last night sadly scrolling through photos of the past three years on Facebook, thinking about how much I’ve changed and how I wish I could do it all over again – not because I regret the way I did university, but because I loved it so much. I had huge expectations for university life, and three years just didn’t give me enough time to do everything I wanted.

Of course, I may be looking back with rose tinted glasses. As much as I loved university, I spent at least 30% of the time crying down the phone and screaming into pillows, whilst the other 70% consisted of house parties, late night talks, and wonderful societies.

Towards the end of my final year, on the way back from a walk, I boldly told my friend that I was going to forge my own identity after university by doing exactly what I wanted to do, ‘because that’s the best way to be yourself’. I don’t think I was wrong – doing what you want to do instead of managing your actions through fear of judgement is great. But I’m annoyed that I didn’t see how far I had come in those three years. I wouldn’t have admitted that I was shy when I started university, but I was. University managed to change that, even if only slightly. I went from saying about three sentences in conversations to actively seeking out new people to talk to. I started going to the parties I’d avoided throughout secondary school. For once, I started to relax and be myself – even if I felt I wasn’t wholly myself yet.

For some people, university really is the best years of you life, so it’s only natural to feel the post-grad blues when you leave. I just wish I’d been a little more prepared.

A Response to Newsnight

A couple of nights ago, Newsnight aired a feature discussing the Welsh language and government plans to change the way it is promoted. With no fluent Welsh speakers on the panel and the history of the language being completely overlooked, Twitter exploded with complaints.

Ultimately, Newsnight apologised last night and ended their program with a performance from Welsh band, Yr Eira, at the Eisteddfod – a great way to give the language and culture the recognition it deserves.

Welsh is my second language. I was taught it from the moment I started school and happily took the option to study it at GCSE and A Level. I guess you could say I am “keen on Welsh”, like the other people who speak the language, or any language at all for that matter.

The feature kicked off with some facts and figures about the Welsh language, showing an ultimate decrease in Welsh speakers from 50% in 1901 to only 11% of fluent Welsh speakers today. No wonder the English perceive Welsh to be a “dying” language, one that is slowly being replaced by English and fading into obscurity. What the program didn’t bother mentioning, however, was why Welsh started to fade into obscurity, a story of oppression and colonisation that I was taught from the age of six.

You see, Welsh people didn’t just decide to stop speaking Welsh one day because English was superior, or gave them better job prospects, or whatever. The mid nineteenth century was a particularly turbulent time for Wales, with many uprisings breaking out across the country (see The Rebecca Riots and particularly the injustice of the Merthyr Rising), the ‘lawlessness’ of which was put down to the existence of the Welsh language.

A parliamentary report in 1847 – which became known as the Treachery of the Blue Books – ultimately felt that the Welsh language was a drawback for the moral development of the Welsh people, which, of course, could only be solved with the introduction of English in schools. This saw the beginning of the Welsh Not, a system that forced Welsh speaking children to speak English or face being punished at the end of the school day. Similar systems were put in place all over the world to ‘promote’ English over other languages.

People did eventually stop speaking Welsh – it became associated with the working classes and many Welsh speaking parents saw it as a drawback for the futures of their children – including Dylan Thomas’s Welsh speaking parents who sent their son to elocution lessons to mask his accent.

This history was completely overlooked by Newsnight’s feature, which seemed to present the language as some kind of time-wasting “hobby” enjoyed by Nationalists determined to see the country fail and cost the tax payer hundreds. They also didn’t consider that people who are “keen on Welsh” are equally keen on preventing the death of the heritage.

The main criticism launched at the feature was the lack of fluent Welsh speakers on the panel. It was great to see Ruth Dawson, a second language Welsh speaker like myself, showing passion about preserving a language she herself didn’t speak fluently. For me, it showed that you didn’t need to speak a language fluently to understand the importance of its heritage.

But the lack of fluent Welsh speakers only seemed to suggest that they were nearly extinct, certainly not helped by the figures shown at the beginning of the feature or the complete ignorance of the history behind the language. I counted the number of first-language Welsh speakers I know personally – there were more than twenty in my circle of friends. There was no excuse as to why a first-language Welsh speaker was absent from the panel.

Even Derek Walcott, a Caribbean poet whose education consisted of having to read English literature as opposed to learning about his own culture, touched on the eradication of the Welsh language in his poetry:

Those white flecks cropping the ridges of Snowdon
will thicken their fleece and come wintering down
through the gap between alliterative hills,
through the caesura that let in the Legions,
past the dark, disfigured mouths of the chapels,
till a white silence comes to green-throated Wales

(taken from ‘Wales’)

It’s not difficult to see Walcott’s point. His images of suffocation, strangulation, and silencing, reflect the negative attitude towards one of the oldest languages in Europe, a language that predates English and continues to be spoken today, against all odds. Saving the Welsh language isn’t just a “hobby”. It’s an attempt to preserve a culture and history after the events of 1282, 1535-1542, 1831, 1847, 1911, and as recently as 1993, 2010, and 2011.

Learning to Fail

After checking my bank balance online, I decided it was time to take a rain check on purchasing the £40 Dress of Dreams™ I’d been fawning over for the past week.

After a month of returning home from university and turning down a job offer in China, I was slowly coming to terms with the fact that I had no current income. Six months ago, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid about handing over forty of my finest English pounds to Zara – but six months ago, the lovely people of Student Finance Wales were there to help. The Dress of Dreams™ would have to wait.

This year, I’ve decided to take a gap year to earn some money before doing a masters. I was accepted to the first position I applied to, but ended up turning it down – my parents found the change of their only child being 160 miles away to 5000 miles across the world a little difficult. This decision all seemed well and good: I’d been able to get a 1:1, nab some freelancing opportunities, and spend some much needed time with friends and family instead of faffing around with documentation and language apps. “I’ll just get another job”, I thought. Oh how naive I was.

People weren’t lying when they said the job opportunities were all in the big cities. I’ve been scouring job sites on the daily in a desperate attempt to find a job that actually pays. For all the criticisms launched at millenials, nobody can fault us for the amount of unpaid work we do. Unfortunately, my hometown has never seemed smaller, and the only jobs available are in recruitment or serving at the new restaurants that have recently opened.

I’d tried to apply for jobs in marketing, grad schemes, or at my local university to no avail. After another post-interview rejection for a position that would have given me the opportunity to live in Italy for a year, I felt completely knocked, resulting in a public cry in the middle of Tesco. “I’m failing at everything“, I whined down the phone to my parents. If you think I was being dramatic and entitled, you would be correct. This was only the third position I’d applied to. Ever. But hear me out.

A few months ago, I wrote an article for my student paper about the unhealthily competitive atmosphere at my university, and the response it garnered felt like double-edged sword. I was overwhelmed by how many people related to the article, sharing it on their own social media accounts in agreement that the competition at Warwick had gone too far. Part of me felt glad that I’d said what a lot of people were thinking. On the other hand, if so many people felt as down about the competitive nature of university as I did, then something must be very wrong.

With the pressure to do well in all areas of life (not exactly helped by the brag-fest that is social media), it’s no wonder young people feel like failures when they face rejection. Whereas getting a good degree may have been the main pressure for students before, the need to find the perfect grad job/work experience/internship seems to have taken precedence.

Before the job rejections, I’d felt genuinely happy about my 1:1. It was a goal I’d set myself from the outset and one that I’d gone above and beyond to achieve. But that happiness and pride seemed to disappear in a flash once I returned home. My friends had somehow landed flashy grad jobs, and well-meaning but nosy distant relatives constantly interrogated me with the question all unemployed graduates dread: “Have you got a job yet?” It’s a question I’m asked nearly every day and every time I answer “No”, I can’t help feeling that, at the ripe old age of 21, I’ve failed at life.

The next few months are probably going to be the hardest thing I’ve done. Maybe even harder than GCSE maths. And it’s all because, not to brag here, but I’ve never really failed before. While scrolling through Twitter on a clearly productive streak (…) I stumbled across a tweet that made me genuinely laugh out loud and give myself a reality check:

It made me realise how stupid I was being. Like most ‘snowflake’, millennial graduates, I’d been told I was clever and capable my entire life. I got the highest grades, was put into the Oxbridge group in Sixth Form, and accepted into my dream university. Of course, this only happened with a ridiculous amount of hard work and hours pouring over textbooks, but it convinced me that if I worked hard, I could get exactly what I wanted. This, I quickly realised, is not the case, hence my Tesco breakdown.

So I’ve decided to use this year as a time to learn something new – cue swelling, inspirational music. Namely, how to fail. I’m sure plenty more rejections are coming my way, but that doesn’t mean my future is void of opportunities. I may not have skipped straight into a grad job, but I’ve managed to gain things I never thought I would. I’m starting a new (temporary) position at Mind, something I’ve wanted to do for ages. I’m about to get paid for my first published article and have just sent off another. In a few months, I’ll be spending a fortnight at The Times.

I may not be raking in the cash just yet, and the Dress of Dreams™ might have to wait for now, but it doesn’t mean I have nothing to look forward to. It certainly doesn’t warrant a public breakdown in a supermarket. What I’ve quickly come to realise, is that failing is ok. You don’t have to hide it, or construct elaborate lies to disguise it. Those who you really want in your life will support you, instead of gloating over your unemployment. And as for the other people? Screw them.