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Marianne, vacation jobs in youth hostel, Germany and 'Enjoy English' scheme, SpainI studied Spanish and German at university and have carried out two lots of vacation work in relation to this. My main motive was to get some practice speaking both languages and to really immerse myself in them. I managed to get a job working in a youth hostel in Germany the summer before I started university, simply by writing my CV in German and sending emails out to youth hostels in the parts of Germany that I wanted to go to. I must have emailed about 100 youth hostels and got a positive reply within a few days from one in a town called Bad Urach in south west Germany. I discovered it was a very small village and the day I arrived I remember being quite apprehensive. I didn’t know if there would be much going on and was worried I might be lonely or bored. Luckily there were two young guys working there doing their community service (an alternative to military service). I was staying in the youth hostel with the family who ran it and they were really great - they had two young kids and other staff so it was like a little community and everyone was lovely. There didn’t turn out to be much nightlife, but I only had to work five hours a day and then I got the rest of the day off, so I would usually spend the afternoons lying out in the sun with my dictionary thinking about all the things I’d heard that day, or things I wanted to say but didn’t know how. I had plenty of time to work on my language. My daily tasks at the hostel involved preparing and serving food, cleaning rooms and dealing with customers. Some days I would look after the couple’s two young children, which was nice as their German was about the same level as mine! I got free lodgings and food and they paid me 50 euros a week, and as there wasn’t much to spend my money on there, I saved it for a trip to Munich after I’d finished. The summer after my first year of university, I got a job teaching English in Spain. I found the job advertised on the internet working for a cultural programme called ‘Enjoy English’. After submitting my application online, I was then called for an interview and assessment centre day in Birmingham with other students from all over the country. The job involved teaching English to classes of Spanish kids in a summer school in the Basque Country and we were allowed to choose which age group we’d like to work with. When we arrived there must have been about 80 people from all over the UK and Ireland and before we were allocated to our separate schools we had three training days together in a school, where they’d converted classrooms into dorms - it was great fun! The teaching was pretty hard going at first because the kids are so lively and we were only allowed to speak to them in English so they got bored easily, but luckily we had a Basque coordinator helping us in our school and I had three other British people working there with me. We all stayed with families which was a very valuable experience and great for my language skills. My one tip would be not to feel restricted. The world really is your oyster and these things are a lot easier to do than you might think! back to top Oli, teaching English, China and LaosAfter graduating from the University of Sheffield with a degree in chemistry, I worked in a laboratory in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital for 18 months doing biochemical research. I had always had the desire to travel and work abroad and although I enjoyed working in science, I decided to move out to Asia and experience something different. I went to Hong Kong and spent a couple of months travelling around southern China. At around Christmas time, I found myself in Dali, Yunnan in the south-west of China. Dali is beautiful, with a lake on one side and snow-capped mountains on the other. I had a good feeling about the place and decided to stay for a bit longer than I had originally planned. I’d seen a poster on the wall outside a bar asking if native English speakers were interested in teaching at a local school. I made a phone call and went to the school the next day for an interview. After sitting in on a lesson, I was offered a job and accepted it. It was a bit nerve-wracking at first as I had never done any teaching but I soon got used to it and started to thoroughly enjoy it. It was a great experience to live somewhere abroad for an extended period of time as I found that travelling only generally gives you a fleeting glimpse of the cultures that you are passing through. I ended up living and working in China for the best part of a year. Eventually I left the job as I wanted to do some more travelling and see a bit more of the world. After spending a year travelling around South East Asia I had the desire to settle somewhere and teach again, so I chose to return to my favourite Asian country, Laos, and try to find a job. Within a couple of weeks I was working as a teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) instructor in a college and also managed to find a job as a grade three teacher, teaching children from ages eight to nine, in a bilingual international school. The year I spent in Laos was brilliant, and my salary was good enough to have a very comfortable lifestyle and also to save enough money to embark on a trip to India and Nepal for five months when the academic year finished. I would thoroughly recommend living and working abroad to everybody. It is reasonably easy to find teaching work all over Asia, and although having a TEFL certificate is useful, a degree in any subject is usually enough to gain employment. Not only does living abroad expand your horizons, it is a great way to meet people from diverse backgrounds and explore the wonderful world that we live in.
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