I have absolutely no clue where else I can put this, I felt it may be appropriate here. I just wanted to get some good news off of my chest.

I began studying for my BSc in CSSE in 2020 which I absolutely adored. However, by the time I got around to looking for work placements, it was 2022/23, meaning all of the layoffs and hiring freezes were starting to ramp up. I managed to find work within my university, however it was more of a research assistant role as opposed to software engineering. While I really enjoyed it and learned a lot, the standard spiel, I always had that feeling in the back of my mind that not having any professional internship experience would harm my job prospects outside of university.

After finishing my BSc, I didn't feel super ready to enter the workforce so in my infinite wisdom I decided to do a MSc because that would obviously give me loads of breathing room to get my ducks in a row. And sure the job market was still pretty bad in 2024 for new grads so I thought "Why not, odds are I won't be able to find something immediately anyways." I was fortunate enough that my family didn't mind the extra year since all the tuition was coming from my own pocket.

After the most mentally exhausting and stressful year of my life, I handed in my dissertation and felt pretty confident that I would be graduating with my MSc in October (which I did). Since I finished all of my exams in June/July, I started applying for a few jobs, but I mostly started applying in September, after my dissertation was in and I knew I would be graduating.

I tried to taper my expectations after hearing stories of the graduate job market, even with a MSc so I was prepared to be searching for a while. By some miracle, after about two months of religious job applications, I managed to get far into some interviewing stages, one of which, I received a contract in November (obviously I accepted).

I could not be more proud of myself and frankly stunned at how quickly I got through everything. I just feel like everything I have done over the last five years has paid off, I start working fairly soon and I'm just chuffed with myself. I left my part-time job that I was with for my entire college experience a couple weeks ago, as a little break, before starting full time work. It's exactly the area of software that I enjoyed the most in university and it's with a pretty large company, people who I know that work there are happy to be there and the pay is more than I could have expected.

I'm sorry if this isn't an appropriate post for here and I know I'm just bigging myself up but nobody that I'm close enough to vent to are working in tech.

Thank you for reading if you got this far.

TL:DR - Played a blinder.