Tentative steps
So, a matter of hours after being replaced as the editor of the University of Sunderland Students' Union magazine Degrees North, I was picked up on Twitter and asked to describe life as a graduate for the Guardian. It was a lucky day – should have bought a Lottery ticket!
Before starting my final year of university in September last year, I had had a 100% success rate at job interviews. That sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is. The first one was easy. My brother was working in a bar short of staff - I needed money to help me through college. I turned up, collected some glasses, got the job. Calling it an interview is a bit melodramatic actually.
The Degrees North interview was considerably tougher mostly because I desperately wanted it - partly as it paid a wage but mostly because I really thought I could do a great job and that it would look good on job applications. I was horribly nervous and even though I tried to hide how much I needed the job, I think it was obvious. Thankfully my eventual boss didn't mind and appointed me. Although to this day I'm not sure if anyone else even applied. I didn't want to ask for fear of bruising my quickly inflating ego.
But finding something to do post-degree is another matter. I want my first step on the ladder to be on a local newspaper, ideally close to my Burnley home. But I've also been looking at internships and placements at bigger news organisations.
I applied to the BBC for one of these placements and I flunked it without even making it to the questions. I had to sit a test about news sense and having swotted up on world, national and local news on the way to Newcastle, I was confident. Too confident as it turned out. I missed a vital detail in a generic press release from the police (not the band). Somebody had stolen a Picasso painting from a house in Gateshead and I, completely missing the crucial sentence cunningly buried deep among police jargon, said it was the least interesting story of the five in total.
I have also sent in my CV for a couple of trainee reporter jobs on smallish daily locals which I thought were a perfect for a recent graduate but after waiting for a couple of weeks with no reply I called and was told the vacancies had already been filled and that I hadn't even made it on to the first shortlist.
This has been a bit of a wake up call to the size of the task that is awaiting me - I had thought, naively, that I wouldn't be out of work for long.
One of my brother's favourite lines of management-babble from work is: 'Where are we now and where do we want to be?' Well, I'm unemployed and want to be working as a journalist. But right now, I'm not sure I know how to get there.
Jambo
