The Beginning of the End

I’m not quite sure where the last four years went because I still feel like it was yesterday when I first moved to Edinburgh and went to my first ever lecture. Recently my favourite coffee shop in town closed down and it felt like the end of a chapter (how very student-y of me to add so much significance to coffee shops, but hey). I’m officially finished with lectures and tutorials and currently on a full-time placement, which will go on until the beginning of April. The placement is in a Children and Families Social Work team for one of the Edinburgh City Council localities and let me tell you, it is real. I’m not talking about the 36 working hours per week, or the fact that I have a very official ID badge that lets me to all the Council buildings in the city (which is very exciting though). I’m talking about the level of responsibility this placement brings and the need for professionalism it requires. It is daunting, but at the same time, I am so ready to graduate and have this be my life full-time.

I’ve experienced an interesting shift in perspective over the past couple of months—I was set on continuing on to do a postgraduate degree at University of Edinburgh or elsewhere, partly because I enjoy academia, but more than that, I think I was intimidated by ‘proper adult life’ with a full-time job, taxes and utility bills. I can’t pinpoint exactly what is was that changed my mind, maybe it was my incredibly short attention span that makes it nearly impossible to focus in lectures, or maybe it was starting a placement, which showed me that a supportive working environments exist and you can really affect real change in people’s lives, that made me excited to enter this seemingly serious and scary (love a good alliteration) world of adults.

To commemorate this, I recently created a ‘hello adult life’ folder on my computer—because that’s what makes it real, right? The first task therefore became to update my CV, which (and please don’t be like me) I’d left untouched ever since my first year of uni. It took me two days and a lot of digging in my memory to put together what it is that I’ve actually been doing for the (almost) four years I’ve been here, but we got there. Now the next step is to slowly start writing cover letters and looking/applying for jobs, just to up the realness level again, and I’ll keep you posted about how that’s going for me in my next little post for you guys.