For years, the path seems simple: finish high school, get into university, work towards a degree, and graduate. Then final year arrives and suddenly the structure disappears. The questions become bigger: “What am I going to do?” “Where will I work?” “Am I ready?”
Figuring out life in your twenties is daunting and exhausting. There is an invisible timeline that makes it feel as though everyone should be moving at the same pace, and falling behind can feel like failure. For final-year students at the University of Pretoria, that impending sense of doom becomes harder to ignore when graduation is no longer a distant idea.
For Tsitsi Mahwire, a final-year BAdmin student in Public Administration and International Relations, that pressure is tied closely to what comes after graduation. “There is a lot of pressure, especially since the job market is so bad,” she said. Mahwire’s worry is not abstract. Her parents are not affluent, and their professional networks are limited by social class. Studies on graduate unemployment in the South African Journal of Higher Education point to limited job-market information, thin professional networks, and skill mismatches as some of the biggest barriers graduates face. For Mahwire, the question is no longer simply “What do I want to do?”, but “Who will help me get there?”
Khokela Maqwazima, a final-year BA Law student, sits in a different place, although that clarity and understanding developed over time rather than arriving at a certain moment. For him, final year is not about not knowing the destination. It is about the harder work of turning that destination into something real: applications, interviews, and the gap between wanting the life you are striving for and building it.
For another final-year student who asked to remain anonymous, the pressure is more tangled. They describe the anxiety surrounding their personal life and career, and how the two might shape the person they become. “As a dreamer, I strive for nothing but the best in life,” they said. However, the economic realities plaguing Black South Africans keep pulling them back down to earth.
For Mahwire, the fear is not only unemployment, but rather stagnation and the mental toll that comes with it. “My fear is spending years doing nothing whilst the world continues on,” she said. A University of Johannesburg study similarly found that graduates who are unemployed describe a psychological toll that goes beyond financial strain: anxiety, uncertainty, and a creeping sense of lost identity that builds with every unanswered application.
Yet uncertainty is not necessarily failure. Mahwire pointed out that even people years into established careers keep questioning their place in a changing world. For the anonymous student, what keeps them steady is smaller and more personal: not the fear of unemployment, but of “not making [their] mother proud”. They hold onto the belief that persistence matters, and that failure is not final.
Maybe that is what makes final year so unsettling. It is not simply the end of a degree; it is the beginning of making decisions without knowing whether they will be right. The real introduction into adulthood.
So instead of asking yourself and others “What are you going to do after university?”, maybe the better question as the finality of the semester slowly sinks in is, “How are you feeling about everything that comes after it?” Being lost is not the opposite of knowing where you are going. Sometimes, it is what happens when the only path you have ever known runs out from under your feet.
Visual: Jemma Thomson
