Blogs: Charles is chasing work experience

Charles Oben graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in French with International Studies. He is now pursuing a career in advertising.

I am free. Utterly, completely and absolutely free! I had my last exam this afternoon and so at last the weeks of being holed up in my room, eyes riveted to one textbook or another, waging war against the heartless beast that is revision and surviving on increasingly small amounts of sleep have finally come to an end. Life feels good. In fact, life feels great. But what’s next? Honestly, I don’t know. 
 
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to secure an internship or a graduate job and so right now, my future is currently looking rather undecided. I have managed to secure a seat on a Masters programme in Spain, but as that starts in February 2013, I’m still uncertain of what the next six months or so of my life will entail. Not to mention that the thought of going back to university is the last thing on my mind right now seeing as I’ve developed a temporary, but rather acute allergy to all forms of study.

I’m not even certain that my Masters will make a great difference to my future employability. I think it will, I hope it will, and after all the research I’ve done and all the people I’ve spoken to, the answer seems to be generally leaning in that direction. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t end up being all that influential in the long run. The problem is I doubt I’ll ever truly know one way or the other.
 
So what now? Well after treating myself to some well earned downtime in order to relax and recuperate both mentally and physically, priority numero uno will be finding some work experience. That above all else seems to be the key difference between a graduate job seeker and a potential future employee.

Of course with looking for work experience comes the work experience conundrum - you often need work experience to be considered in the first place, and yet you’re trying to get that same work experience that will get you an invite to the work experience ‘inner circle’. So in order to try and make the most out of the months ahead, and to prevent myself from going partially insane, (I hear job hunting can do strange things to people) I’m going to try and adopt a semblance of a strategy: 

1. Decide exactly what I want. What industry; what type of role; what type of internship?
2. Identify all possible routes that could lead to said internship and investigate them.
3. Decide upon a number of applications to do every day and stick to them.
4. Explore other ways of keeping myself occupied for the next six months as contingency plans.
5. Pray I don’t have to resort to any of my contingency plans. 

Hopefully I won’t even need to implement this strategy because I’ll get an offer from one of the three interviews I have coming up in June. But I could equally end up with zilch. Anyway that’s all in the future. The only thing I’m planning on doing right now is getting lots and lots of sleep. I’ve missed sleep.