What Should You Do After Graduation?

From conversations with university students, many of you have not thought much about what comes after graduation.

It is understandable. It is hard to focus on the next few years when you are buried in assignments that are due in the next few weeks.

By writing this article, I want to inspire you to carve out time for your future, despite how busy you are.

1. Start slowly, but start now

Even if you still have years before graduation, it is crucial to start thinking about your future now. See what career options you have, and how they fit with your personality¹.

It takes time to discover a career that mirrors who you are.

Also, after you get those answers, you may realise you are on the wrong path. So it may take longer still to redirect the course of your life.

2. One puzzle piece at a time

You don’t have to find all the answers at once. Put together your future plan like you would assemble pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: focus on one piece at a time.

Spend just 10-15 minutes a day on consciously thinking about life after graduation.

Do it in ways that suit you. Write it in your journal, bring it up in conversations with friends at lunch, or talk about it to someone ten years older than you.

3. Generate the puzzle pieces

In each session, use questions like these to cue your mind towards an answer:

Do you enjoy what you are studying?
- You may enjoy being with the people (lecturers or friends) when you study something, but do you truly enjoy the discipline itself?

Who are the people that make you feel ‘Wow, I want to be like that person’?
- What do they have in common in terms of career?

What are the subjects that, when you study them, 3 hours feel like 30 minutes?
- And which classes where 1 hour lab or lecture feels like 1 year?

What are you working on when you feel the world around you fades away?
- What subject matters engage you more? Which ones less?

What were you doing the last time you felt most alive, most connected to Truth and Reality?

Enjoy this process. You are exploring and uncovering your unique self and how to make other people’s lives better because of it.

Principles to consider for life after graduation

While working on your future possibilities, beside thinking about the practical aspects of it, consider these principles:

1. Find a balance between ‘what pays’ and ‘being you’

After graduation, you rarely get to work on what you are deeply interested in. At least not right away.

And most of the time, it is because of money.

And that’s okay. Don’t feel sad about it.

Because life is not linear. Often, you have to make the best decision with the pieces you currently have on the chessboard.

But don’t ever give up on your dream. Because once you do, your senses and intuitions will ignore future opportunities that make it a reality.

Keep that fire alive.

Work on it after dinner or before the morning prayer. Don’t just abandon it.

Too many people spend most of their waking hours on jobs they don’t care about. The money that they chase is then used to perpetuate consumerism, to buy stuff they don’t need — to mask the emptiness that they feel inside.

On the other hand, there are those who love their careers. They feel alive, purposeful.

Their works are the authentic expressions of who they are. Because they love their job, they do it with all their heart, and they become great at it.

And because their authenticity and love manifest as high-quality works, money flows towards them.

After graduation, if you can’t take the money factor out of the equation, find ways to minimise its influence. Live simply and lean — avoid loans like they are venomous snakes.

Resist letting the desire for money to overshadow your pursuit of who you are meant to be.

2. Consider marriage, early and seriously

I used to believe that you should delay marriage, especially if you plan to do a PhD or start a company.

There is a valid argument for it: you have less time for your career if you commit to marriage too.

What I learned from my own experience and that of others has changed my mind.

A loving commitment towards another person is not a diversion from building a successful life. On the contrary, it’s an essential part of it.

Even when I was single, I noticed that married people of my age are generally wiser than me. They see life’s bigger picture almost instinctively.

Marriage, especially for men, unearth another fuel of motivational energy.

Because you are driven to work harder not just for yourself, but for taking care of those you love, and to be someone that your children look up to.

Those are atomically powerful masculine drives.

More than that, intimate relationships are the most reliable investment for life’s fulfilment².

Like other investments, the earlier you begin, the more you learn, and the better the return.

I’m not saying you must marry right after graduation. Just don’t dismiss the idea out of hand because most people around you don’t marry young. Most people have not thought it through.

3. Let your past be a teacher, not a dictator

You are right here, right now because of the decisions made by the much younger — and more naive — version of you.

More than that, it may have been influenced heavily by others around you.

After graduation, if you are happy with where you are and where you are heading, that’s wonderful. Keep pushing through.

But if you know you are not the same person who made those decisions years ago, be open to alternatives in choosing what to do. Do not limit yourself to what others expect you to do.

Also, recognise the trap of the sunk cost fallacy³.

In our context, it means feeling guilty about switching to a different field after graduation.

You think if you do that, the last four years is ‘wasted’. So you decide to tolerate where you are.

But imagine realising, decades later, that you have spent forty years in misery, merely to ‘save’ those four years.

Don’t fall into that fallacy. Our past is meant to provide lessons for deciding our future; it is not meant to dictate it.

Notes:

PS I wrote on this topic in Malay as well. See “Sambung Belajar atau Kerja?”: Menentukan Pilihan Kerjaya

1
For personality tests, there are free options. Alternatively, see whether your university counselling unit offers personality or career compatibility assessments.
2
This has been shown through long-term psychological studies. See Happiness: What We Learn from a 75-year Harvard Study.
3
The sunk cost fallacy is a bias where you continue an unprofitable action because you’ve already invested in it. You don’t want the investment to go to waste, even though stopping minimises your losses. It hurts people a lot in the investment world. A historical example is the Concorde supersonic plane project.