Subject: Theology
Student status: Home, Graduate
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Well it's quite, that's a difficult one because I've ended up in a job that I don't particularly like.  It's tolerable and there's not always a huge amount of customers so, again, I can do a lot of reading which is nice but I don't really see many career prospects because, as I said before, you, everyone seems to want experience. The only experience I seem to have now is in retail and I don't actually want to be working in retail so that's quite difficult. I also don't want to be, I don't want to be a priest which is what people seem to think people who studied Theology do want to do, so it's not immediately obvious what I can do with what I've got. I've thought about teaching and that being a possibility but I don't think I'm really mature enough to teach yet but I know that that's probably somewhere - an avenue which might get me out of retail but I'm not really sure. 

I think what's difficult is realising that the careers sessions you go to at school when you go to quite a pushy, private or girls' school they're sort of trying to say that, you know, you can do anything and all this kind of thing, but actually when you actually get out and try to get a job, it's not quite what you thought it might be.  And that's quite difficult to come to terms with, but I'm not sure.  Ideally I'd like to study more but financially it's not really possible.    

OK so can you tell me about the different futures that you imagined before coming to university and while you were at university?

I think even when I was at university I thought I was going to study Art and that didn't work out, partly because the university weren't very accommodating with the problems I had at the time and then because of finances, I couldn't, even if I had finished that year, I wouldn't have been able to do a further course. So, because it was a Foundation course, I wanted to do a degree course, so I wouldn't have been able to afford it, as it turns out anyway.  So while I was at university I always thought I'd be doing something in the Arts because I was going to go to university again and since that hasn't worked out, I'm not really sure what I am going to do now, so.      

When you look back now, at the way you used to see the future while you were at university, how do you feel about that now?

Well I don't regret sort of being optimistic at all because otherwise I wouldn't have, probably wouldn't have got through my Theology course if I didn't think I was going to be doing an Art course, because I looked forward to doing it and when that didn't turn out as I'd planned, it was quite upsetting and a bit disappointing. So I wouldn't have changed it, as I say, because if I had decided, 'Well I'm going to do my Art course and, you know, that's going to be…' and looked at it financially, then I might have dropped out of my Theology course. As I think I mentioned, I actually, my first year didn't go particularly well with Theology, but by my third year I was really enjoying it.  So I think persevering with that was really important.