The completion of university studies is considered a critical event for young people. In this article I investigate how final-year university students experience temporality by researching their cognitive and relational frameworks. By "cognitive" frameworks I mean how students frame their temporal orientations and by relational frameworks I mean their social involvement with their object of study and their employment status. My research provides a sociological understanding on the explanatory value of these two frameworks as to how agentic the students' life plans are. Data are theorised through a sociological perspective according to which youth temporalities regarding agency can be approached as a sign of a standoff temporality. I argue that standoff temporality is a viable framework for making sense of cases of youth transitions for which the decision-making process and future thinking are fuelled by the temporality of the "present future" and of staying in place.