Graduate Attributes: Confident. A vector of a person with their arms in the air, on a pillarbox coloured background

You will be confident

Confidence

Confidence will help you to excel in your chosen field, even though it's an attribute many find doesn't come naturally.

You need confidence to sell yourself in interviews and when pitching ideas in the workplace.

No matter how many other excellent attributes you have developed, confident people tend to go far because the conviction with which they discuss their ideas leads others to see them as competent.

How will my degree make me confident?

It can take some courage to put yourself forward in unfamiliar situations. You’ll probably remember that in your first university seminar or tutorial everyone kept quiet and did their best not to be noticed. But eventually some brave soul would venture an opinion - and tentatively, someone else would entirely disagree.

You soon realise that there isn’t only one ‘right’ answer at university: sometimes there are as many perspectives as there are people.

Studying for a degree requires you to formulate informed opinions on all sorts of topics and put those ideas forward in discussions and essays: you learn that being asked to defend your views isn’t a threat, but an opportunity to test the soundness of your thinking.

As your confidence grows, you’ll find yourself more actively seeking out conflicting perspectives to test on your own terms. You’ll discover new things about your personality, beliefs, biases and values.

In time you’ll become not only more comfortable with yourself, but those around you. And thanks to the University’s large proportion of international students you’re sure to make friends from all over the world, further helping to develop your confidence in all sorts of social situations.

The confidence you gain in yourself and your abilities from earning a university degree will stay with you for life and enable you to positively influence people wherever you go. If you have confidence in yourself, you’ll likely inspire it in others – an invaluable part of leadership.