The Future Tense

I’ve had one of those discussions with my mum again. One that begins with some idle chatter about so-and-so’s daughter, who has just dropped out of university to pursue a career in Burger King, or that boy from down the road, who has a First-class degree in Golf Course Management. One that starts with a smug sense of superiority that I’m studying my favourite subject at one of the best universities in the country. One that happily talks about all the wonderful opportunities open to me, and then all too swiftly moves on to all the plans I haven’t yet made. One that ends with my mum’s genuine concern that I’ve no more direction than the indecisive, burger-flipping employee and in no better a position for a career than the bunker-inspecting graduate.

At school, I was a very driven young woman. I decided I would attend university before I left primary school; I set my heart on the idea of studying English at Bristol before my teachers even started nudging us in the direction of UCAS. Although I saw my final A-Level grades as an end in themselves and was determined to get straight As anyway, I had only one goal – to earn my place at university.

But I never thought beyond this. My parents were happy because I was working towards my plan. The careers advisor was happy because I was going on to higher education. My teachers were happy because I was working hard and getting the grades. And I was far too terrified of the all-too-real possibility of utter failure to look beyond the next hurdle: the UCAS application, the conditional offer, and finally, August 20^th 2009 – Results Day.

When I was in primary school, I wanted to be a fashion designer or go to Hogwarts. Both were equally unlikely. When I realised I could neither make fabric into a wearable item or a small animal, I set my sights on journalism. I did work experience at my local newspaper and BBC newsroom, and threw myself into various school projects. My CV from the ages of 15-17 is quite formidable. For some reason, though, the more I saw of the news media, the less I liked. My views are too complicated and ill-formed to go into here. It’s a gut instinct and I’m not sure if my moral scruples will withstand my transformation from idealistic student to job-seeking graduate. But anyway, at this point, my career ambitions were superseded by dreams of higher education, and I didn’t put much thought into it.

I’m now less than six months into my university life. Between confirming my place in August and now, there hasn’t been much leisure to do anything else but adapt, very quickly indeed. Living in the present is a luxury that I have fully embraced and adore. But it’s not much use when you can hardly make plans for the summer vacation, let alone for the years ahead.

Many people like to set long-term goals. Mark Watson’s Ten Year Self Improvement Challenge is a laudable, if not slightly anal, mass attempt at refusing to ignore the impending future. For the future is a scary place and, by choosing a fairly arbitrary time unit like a decade, and setting achievable targets that can be worked on with the support of thousands of other like-minded people, we can attempt to control it. I was fully intending to take part, starting on March 4^th 2010, but, even in the long week preceding that date, I was wholly unable to think of one certainty, one single, definite thing I wanted to achieve.

My mum ended that conversation with a similar request: that I at least produce some options for my post-graduate future by the end of the summer. I don’t know whether it’s any more realistic to formulate goals for 2012 than 2020. But I assume I’m going to sort something out in the next two years. Worse comes to worse, I’ll just do what everybody seems to think is the only thing you can do with an English degree: if I can’t do, I’ll teach.