1. Consider your options and your future carefully

“What does he mean by that?” I hear you ask. Well, to be quite frank, we all make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are small things like buying diet Irn Bru instead of regular and sometimes those mistakes are much bigger for example choosing a degree for an industry in which you have no interest. It is true that a great number of students leave high school without really knowing what it is they truly want to do with their lives and thankfully the structure of most university courses allows them to try out various things before deciding what they will take a degree in.

Try your best to find out about the industry you want to go into before you hit your degree year (usually third year in most cases), this applies to any degree and it’s associated industry. If you walk into a degree path and don’t really consider what you could do or even want to do with the piece of paper at the end, you run the risk of coming out the other end and not knowing where to go or what to do. One thing that has been clear to me for quite some time, a degree alone will not land you a job (ok, it might but I would certainly never count on it) and so you have to make yourself as employable to your chosen profession as possible.

Since I started playing with computers I knew I wanted a career with them but I didn’t know what. As I got older I learned how to build, repair and upgrade PCs; I figured out how to do more advanced things with operating systems. I had more knowledge on the subject and by the time I hit college I realised that I wanted to focus on software but then I had to think about what kind of software? Do I want to do tech support where I would be maintaining systems or do I want to actually write the software? In the end, as you can probably guess, I picked software development and things progressed from there.

You probably wont know all the details of what you want to do with your life, that’s fine and I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who really does but you can have an idea of where you want to go. Once you know that you can look into things that might help you, companies, agencies, individuals, anyone that might be able to give you more information.

In short, look before you leap. Consider what you may want to do in your future and see what is out there to help you get there.