What to do after graduation: a checklist for LSE graduates

Your LSE email and your H: drive stay open until the end of December of the year your programme ends. For a summer finisher that is a few months; for a December graduate, it is a couple of weeks after the ceremony. LSE emails a warning before the account expires, and once it has been deleted, its mail and files go with it.

Your transcript and certificate

LSE issues final transcripts and digital degree certificates through Parchment, linked to the personal email address LSE has for you, usually in the week after your results. Check that the address on your record is one you will keep. Taught graduates can collect the hard copy of their certificate during graduation week; otherwise LSE sends it to the permanent home address in your student record, so keep that current too.

The Library

Hand back any Library books first. Your access doesn't end there: LSE gives its graduates life-long access to many Library services. With an access card from the Alumni Centre on campus you can use the building and borrow books from the Main Collection, and registering with LSE Alumni opens a selection of electronic resources remotely.

Between your last deadline and your first job, plans drift. Nobody expects a finished career plan by the ceremony. What helps is movement: an internship, a project or a short contract gives you something current to discuss in interviews, where a blank few months gives you nothing.

LSE Careers carries on

LSE Careers keeps supporting you after you graduate, in stages. In the first two years you have full access to careers appointments, events through MyCareer, and CareerSet, the online tool that reviews your CV and cover letter. From two to five years after finishing, you can have up to two hours of alumni coaching, and after five years in work there is the Professionals at LSE programme.

Applications and timing

Big graduate programmes tend to recruit on fixed annual cycles, while many employers hire whenever a role opens. Use the quieter weeks well: research the sectors you are interested in, add your final results to your CV, and rehearse for tests and interviews before the deadlines arrive.

Use the people around you

Your network is easiest to build while your course is still all around you. Add your coursemates, your supervisor and anyone you met on placements before everyone scatters. LSE's alumni community runs to more than 150,000 people in almost 200 countries, so there is almost always someone already doing the job you want.

"Whether you graduated two months or ten years ago, we can support you."

— LSE Careers

The Graduate visa

This visa lets you stay in the UK to work or look for work after an eligible course. You apply online from inside the UK, while you still hold your Student visa, and only once LSE has confirmed your successful completion to the Home Office. If you aren't sure whether that has happened, ask LSE. Its length varies with your degree and your application date; GOV.UK has the current terms.

If you're going home

Work back from your flight. Close or switch your UK bank account and cancel UK contracts while you can still do it in person, and tell the Student Loans Company if you have a UK student loan and will be abroad for more than three months. If you are coming back for a December ceremony, LSE can provide a visa invitation letter for you and your guests once your place is booked.

Start with the date your hall contract ends, and compare it with your ceremony date. LSE hall contracts run from 31 to 51 weeks, so even the longest ends before the December ceremonies, and many end before July's. If you are coming back to London to graduate, you will need somewhere to stay.

Leaving your room

Go through the room the way the next resident will: clear it fully, take away everything you brought, and take dated photographs before you leave. If you rented privately, send final meter readings to your landlord and suppliers.

Coming back for the ceremony?

LSE lists discounted stays for its graduates and their guests: LSE Vacations, with up to four residences across central London during the vacations and a discount for LSE students, and Club Quarters, which has a hotel on Lincoln's Inn Fields. Book as early as you can.

Student loan repayments

Repayments start no earlier than the April after you leave your course, and only when your income is over your plan's threshold. On an undergraduate plan the repayment is 9% of your income above the threshold; on a Postgraduate Loan, the plan a Master's Loan is repaid under, it is 6%. If you are employed, repayments come through payroll, and the thresholds change each April.

Council tax

Households where everyone is a full-time student don't pay council tax. Once your course ends you no longer count as one, so if you stay on in a rented flat, let your council know.

Everything tied to your LSE email

Subscriptions, student discounts, cloud storage and logins that use your LSE address will stop working when it closes. Move them to a personal email now, and cancel any direct debits you no longer need.

Your certificate isn't handed to you on stage: at LSE what you receive there is a ceremonial scroll. Taught graduates collect the hard copy during graduation week, at a collection point LSE publishes for each round, in person and with ID; PhD graduates arrange theirs through the PhD Academy. Uncollected certificates go out by Royal Mail or courier within about eight working weeks.

Register with LSE Alumni: it is what opens the Library's electronic resources to you remotely, and the Alumni Centre on campus issues the card that gets you into the building. The Alumni Centre is in the Centre Building, just off Houghton Street, and it is there for you to work, meet and reconnect.

An afternoon clears most of this list. The rest, the applications, the conversations, the next qualification, takes longer, and it starts by doing one thing this week.