Time Wasted?

As I sit here lamenting the impending conclusion of my university education, I wonder whether it really has been worth it at all. Was it worth the £10,000+ that i borrowed off the government, ultimately saddling myself for most of my young adult with a sizeable amount of debt? Was it worth the three years of hard slog learning many things that I will probably never use again, unless I go to an inexplicably niche dinner party where word order in Early English and syntax in generative grammar are the topics on discussion, and have my brain stuffed full of intelligent but ultimately useless information?

My timing hasn't helepd my situation either. I arrived at university being one of the first years to pay the top-up fees and I leave in the year where we find ourselves in one of the worst recession in recent memory, with two million or so people unemployment, an over-saturated job market where 20 or so graduates go for a basic shelf stacking job at Morrisons just to pay the bills, less and less gradute employment schemes are out there as companies cut their costs and cast out their driftwood. Bollocks is all I can think.

I have many talented and intelligent friends, most of whom attended university, who are either in unemployment, temping or are in a job that isn't stimulating and they are unsatisfied. I don't have any particular strengths in any particular area, well maybe apart from being able to ramble off some random shite at any moment that pleases me and I also have a party trick of been able to bend my finger all the way back so it touches the back of my hand, but apart from that I got nothing. I am a strictly average 2:2/2:1 student. So what hope do I have of finding a decent paid, somewhat stimulating job in a market where even the better than average students are having problems getting on the bottom rung of the career ladder?

I'm not asking for some sort of high powered position at some faceless IT firm, I wouldn't mind a job in a shop for god's sake. I applied for such a job at a well-known high street store late last year and found that over 50 people had applied for two (that's TWO) positions. I got past the first stage but not the last and thus I remained (and still do) an unemployed student bum.

I look at the past three years and feel nothing. No sense of achievement, no sense of victory, just an overwhelming sense of apathy and a feeling that maybe all this wasn't worth the effort. I should have just took my engineering GCSE (and the rest of course) and ran with it. If i had done that then maybe I would have better prospects than being one of the endless numbers of young adults coming off the university conveyor belt with their average degrees in non-specific subjects. I have learned that when most people discover you are doing an English degree they assume you want to be a teacher. I never wanted to be a teacher. The idea of conducting a class of small/medium/giant children is my idea of torture. I just wanted to do a degree that I would enjoy and would give me skills I could use in other areas and that it has, but I now have nowhere to use them.

What is worrying me the most is the inevitable snowball effect this will have graduate jobs in the future. All those this year who didn't get jobs will, if my assumption is correct, go for the jobs next year along with those who will graduate next year and so on and so forth, creating a graduate jobs market that will be overwhelmed as more and more people go to university.

I have no hope. God this is depressing.

On the dole I will inevitably go. I'll grab my coat.