While I have been scouring job sites and working out how best to pitch myself between 'attentive, works autonomously' and 'vivacious, bright team player', my friends around me have been getting engaged, having babies or are in the process thereof.

For someone who has no certain future and can't see past September, it is frightening to know people have got it so together that they are making decisions which will affect them for the rest of their lives.

More worrying is the impact this commotion around me is having on my thoughts towards finding a career.

As a female graduate my career plan must take my ovaries into consideration while I battle with my male counterparts for a promotion.

Though I was always brought up not to believe there was any difference between what I could do at school compared to the boys, a string of recent articles has made it very clear that women starting their careers today cannot have it all and that moreover, it is time to stop pretending young women like myself can.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, former head of policy planning at the White House, recently wrote an article in American magazine, The Atlantic, which sparked controversy across the world.

Borrowing from her own experiences she explained that her work in Washington had had a direct effect on the increasingly troubled behaviour of her son and she had to choose family over work.

Female professionals everywhere gasped in horror at Slaughter's frankness. In admitting the truth in for all to read she gave up her position as a role model for other young women considering juggling everything as a life option.

According to her ,women should look ahead and plan for promotion and a surge in their career at the time when offspring should be going to college or university but that's a little hard to think of when one is still that offspring she writes about.

Where one fell, another soon rose to occupy the position of role mode. Marissa Mayer was featured on all media platforms when she was named President and CEO of Yahoo in the middle of July.

She is the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 and helped make Google what it is today. But what reaction did this piece of news receive? One of shock, because she is six months pregnant – a fact she announced on the day she was hired by Yahoo.

Some online commentators even thought that it wasn't fair of Ms Mayer to have taken up the role so close to becoming a mother for the first time. How could she possibly do her job with a parasite attached to her stomach? Marissa Mayer was showing women could have it all but the media won't let her.

Forget children, it seems easier to have a successful career without them. Yet young women starting their professional lives should also remember we are statistically more likely to earn less throughout our professional lives and particularly just after graduation.

Last month the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) published a report that found male full-time degree leavers are more likely to earn over £25,000 than females. What makes this report harder to swallow is that we now know more young women than men go on to higher education, so what's the problem?

The problem is hundreds of years old, but my classmates were told it had gone away. As a young woman working out a life and career plan I know it's not going to be rosy or easy.

I'll be poorer and extremely paranoid about my biological clock as well as being aware of the glass ceiling somewhere above me. Faced with the reality that I won't have it all, and I won't, I might join the hundreds of years old solution and get married now. It's never too early to think of these things, apparently.

Better still, we could close the pay gap, change media rhetoric and at least try to manage cultural expectations of women going into the workplace - just don't tell us we'll have it all.