Cher once famously asked, “do you believe in life after Loughborough?”

Well, with our dissertations complete and our final University exams impending, many of us are constantly faced with a less-glamorous version of that dreaded question:

“So, what are you going to do once you finish University?”

If you’re still in first year, or second year if you’re lucky, you may not have experienced this yet – but trust me, like a winter in Game of Thrones, it’s coming. Family, friends, family friends, friends’ family – you get the idea – they all love to ask! But now with the need for a more convincing answer drawing closer and closer, what are me and my friends going on to do next?

Well, if you thought you had a lot of choices when deciding where to go to University, and what to study, multiply that a few times and you’ll arrive at the number of options you have for post-Uni life. Graduate jobs, non-graduate jobs, travel, further study at Loughborough, further study elsewhere, live at home, move away from home – pretty much all finalists have considered most, if not all of these options by now. One of my friends is staying at Loughborough to do a PGCE, one is moving home to work in his local pub for a while, one is going back to his placement company in London to start a graduate role. One is even moving to Newcastle (Australia, not the North-East) to start his dream PhD – there really are no limits!

As for me, in September I’ll be starting a Graduate Entry Medicine course (University location to be confirmed) which is a ‘fast-track’ into the clinical world. And by fast-track, I mean a lot more studying, a lot more exams and I’ll likely be a student forever. But aside from that, I always like to think that the course you study at University should never shut any doors to your future, it should only open them. Most people will change careers more than once in their lifetime, so at the age of 15/16/17, of course not everyone is ready to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives – I certainly wasn’t! But after all the experiences I have gleaned from my time at Loughborough, I am now ready and motivated to take that step towards my chosen career.

So in order to answer the philosophical question posed by Cher I turn to one man and one man alone – Albus Dumbledore. He had this to say: “After all, to the well-organised mind, leaving Loughborough is but the next great adventure”.