When I applied for university study in 2003, the situation facing graduates was very different to how it is today, and it is alarming in many respects that so much should have changed so starkly in only eight years. One thing probably hasn’t changed, though, and that is that careers advice given to me – as in, I suspect, many comprehensive schools – was vague at best. I dimly recall mentioning journalism as a potential career choice and being told something along the lines of “go to university, study English, and you’ll be fine”.
I therefore duly went to the University of Exeter to study English (and Classics), having also applied to Oxford, Bristol, Sussex, Manchester and Nottingham. My highest offer (from Manchester and Nottingham) was ABB; Exeter and Sussex each only required BBB. I'm well aware that the average offer from these places has shot up since then. I also had a rather cavalier attitude to the admissions process, only putting thought into my first four choices and just picking the remaining two because they were good universities and I needed two more choices. Such a devil-may-care approach would, understandably, not cut the mustard now, and would probably come through more clearly in a candidate's application.
My attitude -perhaps due to this, combined with being among the top 5% in my year group –could have been taken as a bad omen, although I did not see it as such at the time. I did well in my studies at university, all the while getting involved with about ten societies every year, volunteering, and...doing any job that would make me a quick buck. Campus and accommodation tours, nude modelling, data entry, waitressing, hotel receptionist, till monkey...you name it, I did it. (I spent all of the money on having fun, mind you, but that's another story.) The general impression I had was that employers would value the transferable skills I had gained from doing these jobs, and I stuck to that. Nobody except potential doctors, lawyers and teachers ever talked about internships or work experience.
During my master's year at Oxford, this head-in-the-sand approach arguably got worse -again, only lawyers, medics and teachers ever said a word about interning, and most other students were, in any case, planning on continuing their studies and becoming academics, and so work experience was not a concern for them. I continued to work at odd jobs as a waitress and till monkey, and only considered unpaid work experience during my second semester, when I volunteered in an Oxford school, and then again at the end of my time in Oxford, when I spent two months interning at IPC Media on expenses only. I had also been blogging and working with an American company since 2007, but I was mainly paid in products, not in money. I never once consulted the university careers service, having been put off by the woolly advice given by my secondary school now four or five years earlier.
Looking back at the sorry catalogue of affairs now, it seems even more absurd that I had got to this point feeling that my transferable skills would be enough for employers on their own. I read the papers; how did I not realise that there was a crisis on and I needed to act faster? Whilst I still feel bitter about the bad advice I received in the early 2000s, and more than a little indignant that employers have apparently never valued all of the skills I acquired from the jobs that I did, I now also feel that I was to blame and should have known better.
It therefore shouldn’t have been a shock or surprise to me when upon graduation I could not find a graduate job – but it was. Other friends took up menial, non-graduate jobs while looking for graduate work; I felt I had spent enough years doing that already and would not settle for anything less than a graduate job, but the reality was that I lacked relevant experience. I arguably made matters worse by casting my net too wide, literally applying for anything that appealed in what I knew was a competitive market, when what I should have done was made a decision about a sector and stuck to it. I am still feeling the effects of my lack of decisiveness today.
After job-hunting from March to August of 2008 and finding nothing, I began to feel really rather depressed by the whole thing. Even with two good degrees and plenty of (albeit largely irrelevant) work experience on my side, nobody even wanted to talk to me. My long-term boyfriend was in France and I had planned to work in the UK for a year to save money and plan the move properly before joining him there. This seemed increasingly unlikely to come to fruition, so I figured that I would be best off just beginning to search for work in France. I was amazed when within two weeks of beginning my search, I was flooded with offers to come for interview. I booked a one-way Eurostar ticket, thinking that even if I didn’t get these jobs, if I wanted to work in France then the best way to hunt for jobs was to actually be there.
I was offered, and accepted, a job as a teacher in an international school to begin the following week. While it was surreal to move out of home and to a new country to start a new life so quickly, I was excited and buoyed by finally being able to put an end to the long-distance aspect of my relationship and by having landed a graduate job. The problem now was different: after a time I came to realise that the little bits of journalism and translation that I had been doing on the side were, after all, what I had really wanted to do.
This was what I meant earlier by still feeling the effects of my indecision. If I had stuck to my guns and decided at eighteen that I really wanted to be a journalist after all, and not a teacher (don’t get me wrong, there are good bits - but it was always only one of several possible career paths for me), I could have trained to be that straight away, either by taking an NCTJ instead of going to university, or by doing it afterwards, and by placing more emphasis on relevant work experience (paid or unpaid). While it is not impossible to break into journalism later on if you change your mind (my credits this year include publication in expat paper Connexion France, which is published all over the country, and Metropolitan,–the magazine you get on the Eurostar), it is much more difficult, especially when trying to start out as a freelancer rather than having a staff job first.
I would therefore recommend to those considering or graduating from university today –particularly now that the competition and financial stakes are arguably even higher – that you make a decision quickly, and stick to it. Get the work experience in relevant fields, and don’t waste time kidding yourself that employers will prize transferable skills from irrelevant work. And above all, stick it out - you could also say that I gave up too quickly on my search, when in reality (especially if your parents are willing to put a roof over your head in the meantime) a year or two years to wait or train for the perfect career is not a long time in the context of an entire working life.
Bio:
Bianca Pellet has been an English teacher of students aged 11-18 in an international school in Paris's 15th arrondissement since 2008, and a freelance journalist and translator since 2007. After studying Classics and English at the University of Exeter, followed by a master's degree in Linguistics at the University of Oxford, she moved to France to forge a freelance career in writing and translation. During her time at university she worked in a variety of sectors - including administration, hospitality, and education - before interning at IPC Media and in schools in 2008, as well as undertaking some private tutoring work. Her publication credits include Connexion France and Metropolitan, and her translation credits include the translation of contracts for Orange and Bouyges Telecom. She has written three novels (that are as yet unpublished) and also writes poetry. In 2004 she became the youngest ever contributor to the academic journal "The Use of English", published by the University of Leicester; she has also contributed to journals published by the Universities of Derby and Exeter, but decided not to pursue a career as an academic. While Bianca finds that teaching provides a welcome compromise of a stable income, good holidays, and the chance to use knowledge gained in her degree studies, long-term she would like to write and translate full-time, having studied French formally and informally since the mid-1990s. She sees her professional and personal future as being firmly located in France, but owes her success so far to her education in the UK.
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