So are you finishing your post-secondary degree and do not know what to do next? Don't worry! This is completely normal. When I graduated with my bachelor's degree in civil engineering, I was not sure whether I was ready to embark on my working career yet. Or even what that would look like. It seemed to me that finishing a bachelor's degree is a huge milestone in our lives and it can be overwhelming.

What I found to help in the moment is to take deep breathes, relax, and celebrate the achievement of graduating. Most of us will only graduate once with a bachelors degree, so enjoy it and share your success with family and friends. I know this is harder to do than said but just know that you don't have to your next steps completely planned because things will work out for the best!

In hindsight, I think what most helped me decide the next steps is to gather as much information about possible paths to take as possible. Look up companies in your industry in what, how, and why they do the work they do. Look at graduate degrees both at home and abroad to see if that interests you. Look at opportunities within government agencies. Look up companies outside your traditional industry careers which might be interesting to you. Most importantly though, keep an open mind and don't make any decisions during the information gathering process. Once you have gathered all of this information, it is time to think about your own values and beliefs. From both of these two areas, you can now start making decisions about what opportunities speak to you.

For myself, I found that many of the opportunities in industry did not present enough opportunities to continue learning and were not "technical enough" roles. So I started focusing my attention on graduate school. Another aspect which focused my attention on graduate school was that many of the jobs in industry which seemed thrilling and exciting to me required applicants to have a masters degree. This may or may not be the case for you but the process I followed allowed me to organically decide upon a course of action that was my own. I firmly believe that if you have done all of your research and gathered all the information before making a decision, you are more likely to be at peace with your decision. So to summarize, look both at the opportunities out there for you and into your own values and beliefs to come to a decision that is your own.

This has been my own experience in how I made my decision to pursue graduate school. I know there are many different paths people take to arrive at graduate school but this has been mine. I think by allowing myself the time to make an informed decision has provided me with a sense of direction and purpose to make more of graduate school itself. Once I made the decision to pursue graduate school, I repeated the same process but by changing the question from "what do I want to do in the future?" to "where do I want to pursue graduate school?". Here I don't necessarily mean where in the traditional sense of location but more generally at which programs and universities I was most attracted to. So again, I embarked on a journey of information gathering of graduate degree programs related areas of my own interests. I looked into my own ideas and values of what graduate school should provide me and compared with the schools I had come up with in my research.

I found the most useful tool to gather all of this information was simply a search engine like Google and a comfortable chair. Ultimately, information gathering operations like this are incredibly time intensive but are so valuable in the long term that you should not limit your information gathering unless there is a good reason limiting the time available to you. For myself, the information gathering stage resulted in 10+ universities and 15-18 different masters programs primarily in North America and Europe. At this point, I gathered information together on masters programs that looked interesting to me without judging each option to the previous option. I really wanted to not miss any programs by becoming more and more biased based on what I had already found. When I was satisfied with the amount and diversity of programs I had gathered, I started to look inward more into what inspires and amazes me about engineering in general.

I realized during this phase that one aspect which I enjoy about engineering is solving not just design challenges but developing the complex technical solutions which can sometimes be necessary. From this fact of what I value, I realized that gaining a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in civil/structural engineering was important to myself. I also realized that I wanted to challenge myself by going abroad and experiences a different culture. More on this idea of going abroad in part 2 of this blog post (so stay tuned). These among others were the kind of self reflection I undertook to effectively judge the best fit for myself among the universities I had previously researched. From this point forward, it becomes a personal story about each of our own unique routines and habits in place (whether consciously or subconsciously) that enable us to find that best fit.

I hope this has been interesting and possibly helpful article for any readers thinking about pursuing graduate school or if you have pursued graduate school, did you follow a similar process? Was it completely different? If you have a different story of finding the graduate program you attended, please leave a note about it in the comment section on LinkedIN as I would love to hear your stories.