Just as it does for many pupils, Gordon’s came to define me. As a boarder you don’t simply attend lessons – you become woven into the fabric of the school and it in turn shapes your outlook for years to come. To this day my friends still refer to themselves in the collective as ‘Camels’…and this is five years on! Life has a funny way of coming full circle. A lot of people leave Gordon’s knowing they will return to the odd parade, event, or maybe even a marriage. But I ended up coming back, all the way back – albeit with a few adventures along the way.

After leaving Gordon’s, I chose to study History and Politics at York based on little more than it was too far for my parents to launch and surprise visits and I thought the subject might turn me into a youthful David Starkey. As luck would have it, York with its slightly insular feel and booky middle-class leanings had more than a touch of Gordon’s about it and suited me down to the ground. I was one of the generation that now seem blessed with £3000 tuition fees, as opposed to the exorbitant £9000 paid by today’s school leavers. These maybe seem justified for a chemistry student with high lab costs and 25 contact hours a week, slightly harder when you have six hours and a library pass. At the price I paid it seemed just about acceptable to go to university with very little idea of how it would advance your career, as much as an interim period of self-discovery as anything more purposeful. Again, I believe just as it can be for many slightly lost teenagers, university was a necessary process for me; a dipping of the toe into the pool of adult-dom with very few worries or commitments, just a wealth of different people to meet and new things to try. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the academic side of university (and if you aren’t genuinely interested in your subject then you probably are throwing money down the pan), simply that it seems a great shame that this element of university is much harder for the undecided to justify further education. While our parents had the freedom to explore an accessible route to social mobility, it seems laughable that young people can now expect to pay forty grand for the same privilege.

The benefits of travel have been bandied around for a while now: enlightenment, tolerance, and perspective are all points I agree come from seeing more of the world around you. One slight misconception I believe sometime pervades this thinking is that it’s not proper travelling if you haven’t gone somewhere truly exotic on a long-haul flight. This simply isn’t the case. At university you will find yourself with a lot of holiday and potentially not a lot of money. I have been fortunate to go to some far flung places, but equally some of the grandest adventures I have faced over the last couple of years have been virtually on our doorstep. Camping round France and Italy one summer, Cornwall and Devon another; Youth hostelling in across Wales; Airbnb-ing in the Peak District; bribing train guards in Romania; hostelling across much of Europe for two months. These trips and memories were all created on a budget, so remember that adventure doesn’t begin and end with full moon parties on a seedy beach in Thailand or a bungee jump in New Zealand – it’s all around you.

Half-heartedly applying to a number of grad schemes in third year meant going through a selection of increasingly mundane tests about your mental aptitude and potential action in the workplace: ‘a colleague has noticed a flaw in the label font in a product batch, what do you do? Etc. If these were the kind of big questions posed in my future occupation, then I wasn’t sold. Instead, I did what all middle class youths do to buy some time and went abroad. After raising money through a poorly planned and torturous two-day cycle across England and back on a borrowed steel bike with five gears and no water bottle carriers, I set my sights on three months charity work in southern India. This was done through the ICS programme, a government-funded scheme that works with charities to send young people on volunteer schemes across the developing world. After a brief stint working night shifts at Smithfield meat market where I had a near death experience involving a refrigerated van and 800 kilograms of pig carcasses, the sub-continent called. Without going into too much detail, this was a fundamentally life-changing experience. Clichés littler this topic like a minefield and can produce scorn in some; but sleeping on a concrete floor, living hand to mouth with people who, by western standards, have nothing except family, friends and religion, certainly makes a mark. Charities are by no means perfect and the work is often frustratingly hampered, however, I cannot recommend it enough. The ICS scheme still runs and is something I believe anyone can benefit from.

Upon my return, I took a wandering path that through zero-hours, minimum wage employment at a well-known coffee chain, internships writing at a number of travel publications and venting at the world on the Huffington Post as my charity job rejections stacked up. Nothing except the writing left me feeling very fulfilled and the hard lesson that writing about fantastic places very rarely means that you actually get to visit them, left me feeling slightly deflated. It can be a tough old world out there and degree or no degree, here I was eight months later and seemingly no closer to figuring out my future.

So what would my advice be to young people who find themselves in similar situations? If you can, don’t rush into a career you see as a stop gap. Obviously sometimes beggars can’t be choosers: bills don’t pay themselves. But when you’re at that interview for a recruitment or IT sales position and you’re nodding away to questions about your motivation and dedication towards the company’s targets, take a step back and think. If you are motivated by the money or product, then crack on – no judgement passed. But if you are making the right noises because you feel it’s what you ‘should’ do, or what is expected of you – don’t. Whilst it sure can help, money doesn’t buy you happiness. You probably wouldn’t buy a house you hated even if it did have good market potential. Similarly, not only will you spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else, you are also investing your time, youth and vigour into the job – it’s a lifestyle as well as a commitment. If you are dreading every day of work, too busy to see your family and friends, too apathetic to do something about it, that’s no life. If your chips were up and all people had to say about you is ‘he hit his targets’, is that what you really want?

And that brings us to the present. It started as a vague recollection that I had fun at school…and the holidays weren’t bad. Having never really grown up, going back seemed a fairly logical step. For boarders, Gordon’s is the reassuring constant that home sometimes isn’t: a truly special place that people sometimes don’t appreciated until too late. Without sounding glib, every day has something for me to look forward to and work rarely feels like ‘work’. My time as a Graduate Assistant has been so fulfilling that I have decided to begin my teacher training next year with the aim of becoming a history teacher. Now I’m not saying that I used to lay awake at night with dreams of my perfect career as a history teacher, but I was always honest with myself. I tried different things and had enough self-awareness to realise when they weren’t for me. Choice is a powerful thing and young people have a huge amount of choices to make after leaving school. Things will get better, but it’s your job to make it happen. Keep smiling.