From Graduate to Consultant: When You Stop Interviewing for Jobs and Start Interviewing the Work

I was in my final year at the University of Nottingham when the shift happened — not during a careers fair, not after an inspiring talk, but on a quiet morning in the Hallward Library. I had arrived early, coffee gone cold beside me, scrolling through roles I felt increasingly detached from. They all sounded similar. Different companies, different logos, but the same narrow expectations of who I was meant to become.

I came from a British–Nigerian household where education was treated seriously — not as a passion project, but as a responsibility. I was the middle child, the one expected to be sensible, to convert effort into something tangible. Consulting, advisory work, anything that sounded ambiguous felt indulgent. Real jobs had titles. Real jobs followed paths. That belief sat deep, and I didn’t question it easily.

The incident that forced the issue wasn’t dramatic. A graduate scheme I’d been tracking quietly removed its intake page. No announcement. No explanation. Just gone. I refreshed the browser more times than I want to admit, irritated not just by the disappearance, but by how exposed it made me feel. I realised I had been waiting passively for permission to move forward.

My first reaction was resistance. I dismissed alternative routes as unstable. I told myself that sticking to the plan was maturity, not fear. But the unease lingered. In seminars, I noticed how often we were solving problems without being told the answer. In group projects, how frequently we were defining the brief ourselves. These weren’t academic exercises they were simulations of real-world ambiguity.

It was during a coursework supervision that something clicked. A tutor remarked, almost casually, that the strength of my work wasn’t the content but how I framed the problem. I brushed it off at the time, but it stayed with me. I began to see that my degree had trained me to analyse messy situations, prioritise under constraint, and make decisions without full information. Those were consulting skills even if I had resisted calling them that.

Around then, I encountered the concept behind HAPHÈ  a Greek word meaning to connect for the good of the whole. It reframed something I’d been struggling to articulate. My anxiety wasn’t about work ethic or ambition. It was about over-investment in a single outcome. My thinking had become concentrated around approval — being chosen, accepted, validated.

Diversifying mentally didn’t mean abandoning structure revealing Instead, it meant mapping my skills independently of job titles. What problems could I solve? What environments energised me? What questions did I keep asking that others avoided? Once I did that, conversations changed. Interviews became discussions. In some cases, I found myself asking harder questions than the organisations did.

There was still hesitation. Consulting-style work felt exposed fewer guarantees, more responsibility. But it also felt honest. For the first time, I wasn’t contorting myself to fit a role that might disappear. I was evaluating whether the work itself was worth my time and attention.

University hadn’t failed to deliver a career. It had delivered something more durable: a way of thinking that could travel across contexts. When I stopped interviewing for jobs and started interviewing the work, the power dynamic shifted. And with it, my confidence.

The world beyond university is full of opportunity often broader, more flexible, and more attainable than we expect. But only if the mind is prepared first. That, I learned at Nottingham, is where the real work begins.