So you approaching the end of term and the holidays are coming. Hopefully you have had time to celebrate the end of exams and you have some ideas for holidays and perhaps some sunshine. Time to relax. Well yes it is. In a way. But I have a brief piece of advice for this time of year.

If you are taking finals this year, congratulations and I hope it all went well. I hope you have plans in place for your next steps – but if not, I have some advice here.

For the others, the main advice is to take some time to think about what you are going to do after you graduate. If you have a career in mind, any experience you can gain of the profession you are interested in will be so valuable for you. Even if it’s having a coffee with a family friend who works in that area or talking to a friend about it. Even better, visit someone who does the job in their workplace. It’s so important to get a sense of what it is like to spend time in the working environment you are heading towards. Best of all, getting some actual work in your new career is absolutely the best thing to have. Sometimes students do this and realise really quickly that they really do not want to go into that job. Perhaps they find that the law is not like “Suits” or that working in Human Resources is rather different to what they expected. Finding this out early is really useful. Yes it puts you back into not knowing where you are going to be working, but you can then go back to thinking about what else you might do.

You will find tons of support, ideas and tools with your careers support which you will be able to access in the first instance online. But don’t put it off. Arrange to see them before you leave. Go on. Do it now!

There is more in my book which covers other ideas about everything else you need to know about studying at University.