Spring may be the season of renewal for nature, but for students and graduates a sense of new starts and endless opportunity comes with the fall. The smell of leaves underfoot has positive associations of leaving the past behind and moving on with a new ‘semester’ — whether or not you’re still in college.
For those who have just graduated or are entering their final year of school, that forward-glance will be keener than most. Graduation feels like a moment of redefinition. In practice, however, that moment may last as long as a decade, as you segue from education and living a cheaply as possible into a career and a greater emphasis on quality of life.
A lot of students end up staying in the city where they studied, by default. If you left home straight from high school to study, then your college city already feels like a place where you redefined yourself. This is where you met your first adult friends and learned to navigate a neighborhood as grown-up. Away from whoever raised you, this may feel like ‘your’ city.
But there are lots of good reasons to move on, particularly for business students hoping to start up their own company. Of course, there’s nothing like establishing a business within and for your present community. But if your ambitions are more global then it is worth reconsidering where you live from a more objective perspective, rather than defaulting to the town where you already feel comfortable.
Friendship, health, and art are also essential — even for the highly-driven young entrepreneur! — so these are also elements you’ll want to account for when picking a place to live. The people over at Resume.io have created a guide to help new graduates choose among the best cities to live in Europe, depending on your priorities. They added up and analyzed stats from the European Commission’s Eurostat program and Numbeo to figure out where the best places are for affordable rent and cost of living, local economy, social life, art, and wellbeing infrastructure are today.
One of the great things about this report is that it reveals the value of some cities that young people — especially American emigrants — might not otherwise have considered. The number one city in Europe for graduates, for example, is Glasgow — not the first city you think about when picturing the UK or even Scotland.
Glasgow rated highly on several of the variables that Resume.io looked at, and was competitive on a general level. For example, 39% of survey respondents said they were “very satisfied” with the sports and fitness facilities in Glasgow — the happiest any local population is with their fitness infrastructure, from those cities the study looked at. Glasgow is traditionally a working-class city, so the arts and music scene is also vibrant and edgy (the second-highest rated in Resume.io’s sketch) and the rent is still relatively low, which is great news for graduates who expect to live on a tight budget while getting their big start-up idea off the ground.
Importantly, Glasgow’s students feel the same. Nearly half the students graduating from Glasgow’s local universities choose to stay on in the city to work. Around two-thirds of the overall graduate population in the city studied in Glasgow. This seems to indicate that Glasgow is a ‘well-kept secret,’ appreciated mostly by the initiated — and that it is worth a visit to find out for yourself.
If you have more specific preferences, there are a couple of other ‘most promising’ destinations for graduating entrepreneurs. Madrid, the capital of Spain, is a hotbed of graduate talent, thanks to its scale, highly-rated universities, and status as a business center. If you’re looking for friends and new talent to develop your ideas alongside, Madrid is a good option.
If you’re more of a bedroom developer, growing your business and your network through your laptop, then cost of living might be a bigger pull. In Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, you can get a one-bed apartment for under €400/month. You could pay your way with just a few hours of freelance work a week, and spend the rest of the time developing your project.
But if you want to go straight to the heart of the European business world, Resume.io suggests Munich in Germany. The city is a major hub for engineering, finance, and publishing. The city and country are known for their robust economies. In Munich, unemployment is low, wages are high GDP is on the rise, and you will always find somebody with whom to talk shop.
For more insight into the best European cities for graduate living, check out Resume.io’s infographic of detailed rankings.
