Uni Will Never Be Like Real Life

Being a recent (and unemployed) graduate I am one of the many that are currently struggling to find work, without ending up in a rundown factory packing perfume testers into boxes for less than minimum wage.During my unemployment I have found several opportunities to do work experience in order to improve my employability and prevent me from whiling my hours away watching Jeremy Kyle and his constant battle against the moronic hordes.

Whilst at University I was bogged down by the paperwork and irrelevant nature of a lot of what we had to do. For example making a perfect cube from Foam board over and over again until it was “acceptable” and “within tolerance” and writing research reports and feasibility studies that had to have a certain number of words in them and no plagiarism, along with The Essays. All this meant that by the end of my degree, I couldn’t really remember why I wanted to study interior design, and on more than one occasion I came close to giving the whole thing up as a lost cause.

In June last year I was released into the big, wide, REAL world. I didn’t really have a clue what to expect. I had no idea how a design practice was run or how many essays I’d have to complete or in what time frame.It came as a huge surprise to me when, having been accepted for work experience, I wasn’t expected to complete any essays AT ALL. None!
This left me feeling confused and lost. If I wasn’t meant to be writing essays, what WAS I supposed to be doing?

It turned out I was supposed to be designing. Designing real things, with a real budget, that are really going to be made.This made me feel both elated and terrified all at once. What if, after all that uni work, I am actually a terrible designer? Academically, I’m not very good. I’ve never managed to achieve the grades people expect from me. I am intelligent, but I can’t get my intelligence down on paper. As soon as people put guidelines and rules and regulations on paper in front of me I flounder around like a cat in the ocean, not really knowing where to swim and wondering how the hell I ended up here and thinking about how much I hate being wet. I always had a problem with briefings because I just didn’t understand what was expected of me. Even reading through my notes and the documentation given to me after the briefing didn’t help and I hated asking for it to be explained again as I felt like an idiot. Everyone else always seemed to know what was going on and if I asked them I ended up getting on their nerves as it looked like I hadn’t been listening. What I really needed was a list:


1) Think of a design

2) Research design

3) Draw design

4) Evaluate design


Obviously it was a lot more complicated and spider web-like than this, but this was the main list I worked from if I failed to understand what I had been told to do. Which was often.This problem became completely irrelevant in the work place, where there were no peers to think me a fool – I was the new girl, it was ok for me to not understand occasionally, and what with the lack of uni rules and regulations thing didn’t become over complicated and hard for me to process. When asked to design something, I didn’t have to produce whole rooms full of research to back it up; I just had to know how it was done and what materials I was using.

This has left me wondering what the point of university is. I mean, yes, I get to put some letters after my name and tell people I have a degree but when it comes to real life I have no experience or education in what really happens at an interior design establishment.

Yet I paid over £3000 a year for this. I’m going to be in debt until my grandchildren are born at this rate. And now people are expected to pay £9000 a year! My advice is this – don’t do it. Don’t go anywhere near university, especially at that price. So yes, you have fun, meet new people, try new things, have an exciting and interesting life but at the end you are in no way prepared to get a job in your chosen field and commence living.

What used to irritate me more was that my lecturers never seemed to get the fact that I was PAYING them. They were disorganised, late, confusing, boring and arrogant. And I was paying them £3000 a year to do that.

I reckon that these days people are better off doing apprenticeships or training schemes with individual companies. It’s far cheaper and often you’re guaranteed a job at the end of it, meaning you don’t end up lost in the back of your sofa whilst trying to get away from Jeremy Kyle and pals.