Where I’ve Been…

You know when you blink and then all of a sudden 322 days have passed without writing a blog post on a site you spent years loving and caring for?

Yeah that happened to me.

I never stopped thinking about my little place on the internet (cue the violins) and I did give this site a little make over at some point in the last year. However, never being able to prioritise this blog along with having other life commitments, meant it fell to the wayside. I’m not sure why I think now is a good time to come back, being busier than ever, but some force has given me the push.

For now, I’m attempting to make a return, it may be *temporary *permanent *long-ish term (I’ll pick one that fits as we go along) because ultimately I always come back to this place. It’s mine. It’s familiar. And let’s be honest it’s a permanent space for my thoughts/life/career events than Instagram’s terrible algorithm ever will be.

So enough of me guiltily excusing myself to the Internet, where have I been?

Graduating

Finally, after three years of hard work I graduated from University of Bolton with a First Class Honours Fashion Degree. That meant the beginning of this year was spent working my a** off trying to get the best grade I could possibly achieve. Without giving too much away, *blog post of the day incoming* I’m pretty happy with myself and the collection I created. It’s been an unexpected transition to get used to life without working towards such a creative degree and I’m still trying to process the emotions attached to that. But I’ve managed to not quite escape the education system just yet…

Entering the ‘Real World of Work’

I try to stand by the mindset of everything you put into life, is what you’ll get out of it *imagine a more succinct version of that quote here*. For example, a time doesn’t come to mind when I’ve ever turned something down because you just never know what saying yes will lead you on to. It’s also basically the no.1 rule of a graduate that you take every opportunity offered to you because they won’t come around often.

It was through making contacts with different people that lead me to my first part time position in the working world. I’ve learnt a lot in such a short space of time and I’m grateful for the opportunity. I’ll *hopefully* have a post uploaded fully introducing the role, what it entails and how I’ve been multi-tasking. And if you are too eager to find out who I’ve been working with, I did upload an instagram post announcing it a few weeks ago (@sophiesamantha_fashion).

Back to Uni

It’s an intimidating prospect to have to decide what to do with your future, at any stage. But when it came to finishing my undergrad, I knew I wasn’t quite finished with education. Weird, I know. There’s still so much I want to learn, I knew studying an MA had to be on the cards. Cutting a very, long story short, I started studying at Nottingham Trent University in International Fashion Management. Ultimately, because I want to learn the business side of the industry and understand how I could potentially one day manage my own brand. It’s a huge culture shock and a completely different educational framework to what I’m used to but I just have to focus on the end goal, reminding myself why I’m here. Overall, I’m still in the early stages of the course but it is really interesting. However, trying not to burn out early on in the semester is proving a real balancing act, so wish me luck on that one.

Phew.

Coming back to this blog has been less daunting than anticipated and a comfort to fall back into the rhythm of writing. The important question is, how long will it last?

See you next week, I hope.