Browsing by Author "Partanen, Maria"

Objective of the study. The transition from university studies to working life is one of the most important transitions in students’ life. Transition contains a variety of emotions, and it is important to understand the emotions that students experience in the transition phase. Transition from university to working life has been investigated from various perspectives, but there does not exist many previous studies focusing on emotions in the transition from university studies to working life. This research investigates the emotions general and adult education master students and graduates experience in the transition from university to working life and explores the critical events to which these emotions are related to. Methods. The participants of this study were 9 master students who were in the final phase of their studies and 11 general and adult education graduates, who had graduated no more than 15 months ago. The data were collected by interviewing the participants about the critical events in the transition from university to working life. The interview data were qualitatively content analysed. This allowed to trace the positive and negative emotions participants experienced and the events these emotions were connected to. Results and conclusions. Based on the results of this study, general and adult education graduates experienced mostly positive emotions in the contexts of university studies and working life. Positive activating emotions were more connected to working life than to university studies. Anxiety was the most experienced negative emotion in the university studies and insecurity in the context of working life. The situations related to master thesis, combining studying and work, job performance and job search evoked most of the reported emotions.