Ah...

... darkened rooms and University Challenge, that's better. Though it hardly needs saying that UC, too, is causing some pangs of regret, bec-a-use...

1) I'm not at university any more. Those days are gone, frittered away like an hour on a parking ticket. Hmm. Need to work on those metaphors. Anyway, it feels like I should have so much more to look back on, even though that would presumably have entailed some rather serious neglect of work*.

2) I wasn't on University Challenge. Though since there was only one team during my time at College, which was in my third and final year and I was therefore ineligible, it can hardly be described as my fault.

3) UC teams - and, I believe, the actual colleges they represent - often contain terribly intelligent, terribly well brought-up, terribly attractive young ladies, and I think it's jolly bad form that in three years no Home-Counties public-schooler deigned to meet me and become a lifelong friend. [/tongue in cheek]

Now, I think I'm just going to have to start reading The Times Top Graduate Employers guide cover-to-cover. This would all be so much easier if I was actually convinced that I was looking for a Graduate Employer, rather than - say - a postgraduate place, a charity, a travel firm, a law conversion course, a monastery...

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*The fact that work took me so long, either because of ability or lack of focus, when others were acting, rowing, sporting, romancing, drinking, lunching, shopping - oh, and planning their futures - is in my view more evidence that I wasn't really good enough for Cambridge. Loads of undergrads think when they arrive that they must've been let in accidentally through some administrative error; perhaps unusually, I still think so. Even if this suspicion is incorrect it speaks of pathetically low self-belief, which is in fact a much bigger problem than a favourable admissions cock-up...

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Just started on the Times guide (last year's, but I'm not about to start paying for it) and already on ABN AMRO I've lost track of what the spiel actually means. Maybe I've got it all wrong and have been beating myself up over this incomprehension when in fact nobody else understands it either...

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Up to AstraZeneca now. Maybe I've been looking at this all the wrong way. After all, I've repeatedly felt that people in big-school/university/careers were completely different to me, looking at them from below, and that it Wasn't The Place For Me. But, even if I never took quite the conventional path, did I not belong at school and at university as much as the next man? Maybe graduates with big impressive careers aren't completely alien and qualitatively different to me. After all, everyone looks at Grown-Ups as another, much wiser and older, species, until we become them and realise nothing's changed, we just wear different clothes sometimes. Maybe (despite what experience suggests, avoiding eye-contact with people at careers fairs... oh and that stereotype from Ernst & Young I met last term) I'm not inherently incapable of Going Somewhere.

(As you can see, my sense of calm is being nicely nurtured by slow, methodical careers-guide reading. It's just a thin veneer though, held in place by conscious direction to slow down and not to panic, aided by some nice slow, quiet music...)

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Mind you, I still don't really see why all these firms go to such lengths to advertise when they're going to reject most of the people who apply. Perhaps they should just get a list of university societies and skim off the captains/presidents... Incidentally, has anyone seen anything to suggest that the 'milk round' actually exists?