The End of an Era - 4 Years of Being a Fashion Design Student

So 4 years have come and gone and I can finally say that I’ve got letters after my name, as my mum seems to constantly keep telling me, achieving a 2:1 in Fashion Design with Marketing and Production from the University of Huddersfield, I couldn’t be prouder of myself and how far I’ve come both as a person and a designer! My four years at Huddersfield, which included a very messy first year, an interesting second year, a year of adventure and discovering during my placement (third) year and a lot of sweat, tears and mental breakdowns in my final year, Huddersfield and my university life was all I expected it to be and more!

I made lifelong friends and memories, grew as a person and became a lot more independent, although I did still take the majority of my washing home for my mum to do, oops! But now it’s all come to an end, and the girls who became somewhat more like sisters than just friends have all gone different directions, one too many bottles of prosecco/wine have been drank at Grad Ball and our the typical white girl photo of us throwing our mortar boards into the air at graduation has been taken, what’s next?

So many of my friends who are either finishing university now like me, or finished last year have no idea/still have no idea which path they want to follow in life, but you know what that’s perfectly OKAY! I think we’re brought up with this illusion that you do your GCSE’s, than your A-Levels, then you go to uni and when you graduate you’ll get a job handed to you straight away. Yes, some people are exceptionally lucky and get grad jobs within weeks of finishing uni, but does everyone? No.

Personally, I’m somewhat lucky because I realised during my placement year, when teaching a Fashion Design course at a summer camp in California, (anyone who is thinking about doing Camp America, I beg you to just apply, it changed my life completely, even more than university did!) that I wanted to eventually become a Fashion Design lecturer, so the next logical step for me is to do my MA which I’m going to be starting this September back at UOH studying Fashion Textile Practises. Part of me just thinks I’m clinging onto being a student for one more year, but I know doing my MA will benefit me in more ways than one.

So whether you’ve got a vague idea of what you want to do next or none at all, it’s okay, I’m a firm believer in that everything works out exactly how it should be in the end, you’ll get the job, you’ll get onto the course, you’ll travel around the world, it just takes some time.

Jess xo