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IMPACT | What Comes Next
200
STUDENTS ATTENDED WHAT COMES NEXT EVENTS THIS YEAR
92.9%
STUDENTS SAID THEY FOUND IT USEFUL HEARING FROM GRADUATES
11
RECENT GRADUATES HAVE VOLUNTEERED AT WHAT COMES NEXT EVENTS
WHAT COMES NEXT? Graduate volunteers are advising students about what to expect after graduation in our new alumni speaker series.
R
ecent graduates in 2022 are the most resilient. These are the alumni who have completed their degrees and commenced their careers during the pandemic, when the job market was at its most competitive. In our new event series, What Comes Next, recent graduate panels are sharing the valuable lessons they have learnt transitioning from student to working life. Having recently been through the process themselves, their experience is relatable to current students, who are curious and apprehensive about the next steps after graduation. The events are course aligned, so that students can hear from alumni who were in their very position a few years prior, and be inspired by the varying routes they took with that degree. “You need to have patience,” says Georgiana Mariut (BA International Relations and Development, 2018), who spoke to Politics and International
Relations (IR) students at the first What Comes Next event in November. “In my first six months after graduation, I wasn’t sure whether I should stick around or change my career direction. At the beginning I did face a lot of challenges. In total, it took me about a year to get my head around all of it.” Georgiana now works in cyber security, but as a student, aspired to work in government. “Most people who study IR want to go into something like diplomacy,
Joining Georgiana on the panel was Bertany Berty Mounkela (BA International Relations and Development, 2019). Bertany also planned to go into diplomacy, but during his degree, discovered a passion for development and now works in investor relations. “There will always be something that comes up to trigger a different interest. I ended up focusing on economic development and global economy, specifically on the African continent,” he explains.
WITH COURAGE YOU ARE BUILDING CONFIDENCE AND INEVITABLY BUILDING A SENSE OF PURPOSE. which is pretty difficult to get into. There’s lots of competition. So I went for the opportunity that was available, which back then was recruitment. “So this is where I am today. I’m a recruiter, but I work specifically with cyber security firms. It’s very niche, but very international. I’m happy because I learnt a lot about international markets.”
“I think the challenge for me after graduating, was how do you go to an employer and tell them I studied IR, but I want to get into the investment sector? I had to do some extra learning on the side, just to show some type of background of the field itself. But every time I went to an interview, I would remind them how you can cross the bridges between IR and investment.”
