Interns, Sminterns

I’m lucky.

One of my mother’s best friends happens to be the editor of a national magazine, so, primarily down to begging I am currently in the middle of a two-week stint as an intern. In fact, it was only meant to last a week, but they’ve asked me to come back and do some stuff for their Christmas section online, so a week’s “helping out the son of a friend,” has suddenly turned into a two week placement, something which is far more useful on a CV.

However, I’m lucky.

This is definitely not the norm in the world of work. Sure, there are unpaid internships advertised, which should, in theory, lead to you getting the experience which will enable you to obtain a paid job in your chosen area of expertise. Getting one of these however is rather more difficult. Not only is there the huge element of competition, but also those crucial six letters “unpaid,” which immediately throws the proverbial spanner into the works. Graduates simply cannot work for free.

You can split graduates roughly into two categories, those who have moved back to the family home, and those who are living independently. For those living at home, unpaid internships can be doable given parental support (that’s how I’m surviving); no rent, bills, or high living costs, but for those who are not living at home, a lack of money entering the bank is simply impossible. On top of rent, bills and living costs some internships do not provide for travel costs; which, depending on where you live (London commuters know what I’m talking about), can make an internship financially impossible. My peak-time all zone travel card cost me £48 last week, a huge chunk of money for a graduate working for free. Luckily (I’m lucky after all) my travel costs are covered by my company. For those that aren’t as lucky as me however, this is a horrible situation. For a lot of graduates, there is financially no way that they can take on an internship, leading them into the perpetual catch-22 situation; I don’t have any experience to get a job, but I can’t get a job to get the experience.

The length and type of internship can also be an issue. I currently have a friend who is on a year-long unpaid internship (with travel expenses) at a major Opera company, and hopefully, by the end of that year they will have obtained enough experience to be able to apply for a paying job within that company. However, the reason that they are able to survive on this internship, is through the support of their parent’s; by helping out with rent and bills. Even working an extra job on a freelance basis is not enough to allow a graduate to survive unaided, as this person is doing, on top of parental support.

As well as the financial impact long unpaid internships can have on an individual, there is also no guarantee of a job at the end of it. My parents tell the story of a friend of the family who, having left university, started a nine-month internship at a recording studio, unpaid, with no expenses. At the end of that nine-month period he was not offered a job, and was simply sent on his way. He had worked for nine months, completely free of charge, and were able to get rid of him because they were well aware that there were plenty of other people who would happily work for free, as opposed to someone who had the experience and now needed a financial incentive to both stay with the business, and survive.

Some would argue that the blame can be shifted on us (graduates); that we should have been gathering this work experience during our summer holidays. However to that argument I would immediately counter it that many graduates had to spend their summers earning money to pay their bills for their student houses, negating the “golden,” opportunity they have supposedly missed. Students are just like anyone else who don’t work; terminally short of cash.

Internships can be an immensely useful tool. However, the financial issues which plague them make them impossible for many graduates, especially those who do not live at home and are having to provide their own living expenses. As for me, I’m actually not sure how to describe them. I want to call them a necessary evil. But I’m not sure about the necessary bit.

P.S. A big thanks to Emma Black for showing me this viedo, it sums up my last post rather well...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2TbQrkk-wk

The End of Crisp Choice

Graduation is one of those bitter-sweet moments in life. Bitter, because it’s the end of three years of drunken debauchery, lie in’s, next to no accountability, lie-in’s, and the only big decision that needs to be made is whether to go for McCoys or Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps. It’s sweet because it’s the end of university; this is the time when we finally get handed the keys to the real world, where we’re expected to go out and start changing the world, one day at a time. Of course, this is what is meant to happen. In September 2010, this no longer applies. No more was this drilled home to me than later that graduation night, where, as I like to think (hope?), all great decisions are made, the pub.

I suppose a tiny amount of background is in order, because what’s an opening blog without it? I’m a 21 year old Politics graduate of Sussex university. Having left Sussex (and the broader city of Brighton), I now live back at home with my Mum and Dad in South-West London. I have two older brother (seven and nine years older respectively), both of whom are graduates of the University of Southampton, and who both work in marketing up in town. I’d like to think I was a fairly conventional student. I did my work around a schedule of parties, booze and telly. My house and I had a cat against the wishes of our tenants agreement. I went home every third or fourth weekend to have washing done and to eat decent food. In my three years I had barely mastered the art of scrambled eggs. Like I said, fairly typical student.

There were two events which took place that have truly informed my opinion of what it means to be a graduate in today’s day and age, the second being that graduation pub trip. The first occurred on results day, that tradition of arriving onto campus to find your degree result pinned to a notice board, for the rest of your classmates to see. See the photo in the top left of the page...

As you can see the majority are “Upper Seconds,” i.e. the magic 2:1. As the day developed, and I went to various other courses results parties, the other boards showed a broadly similar picture. As, later on, our extended group of friends sat outside the bar on campus with a jug of Pimm’s and a smile on our faces, it became obvious very quickly that everyone there had achieved a 2:1. Everyone. Out of a cross-section of about 15 people, spread over courses the range of the university, everyone had achieved the same result. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry was the same. In fact, looking over all of my University acquaintances, I only would consider myself friends with one person who achieved a first. I only knew one person who had been awarded a 2:2. This struck me as odd.

The second event which shaped my thinking on graduates and their futures was that fateful graduation pub trip. What made it different from all the others, apart from that I wasn’t a student anymore, was that my brothers were there. It being a trip made immediately after graduation, and that my brothers like to mention I have no idea what I want to do with my life and am therefore a massive twat, the conversation turned to graduate jobs. My brothers, having graduated from their initial degrees in 2003 and 2004, were telling us how almost all of their friends had had jobs lined up for the immediate aftermath of University, ranging from Sky TV, to management consultancy, and, in my brothers case a year later after his Masters, accountancy. What they were shocked to find, and which I had not even realised, was that not one of my friends had a job lined up post-graduation. I should qualify that distinction; by that I mean a job in which you could expect to spend a number of years advancing slowly up the ladder, as opposed to, for example, working in a retail environment. Sure, I know several people who have lined up post-grad education, several are about to begin training for their PGCE, several are beginning Masters courses, and the individual who achieved a first is going onto Cambridge. But in terms of real-world jobs, there are very few out there.

Those are my initial thoughts on the fate of graduates from the class of 2010, and, if you hadn’t guessed from the title, that’s pretty much will be what this blog is going to be about. Those issues that face all of those who are entering the big, scary, world of work. And it’s not all going to be about jobs and what-not; it’s going to look issues such as moving back in with your parents, an event a lot of us are going to have to put up with as, especially in London, it becomes increasingly difficult to afford rent/ deposits (eventually!), and the sudden loss of independence, the trials of unpaid internships, and maybe even a bit of stuff about planning gap years as I try to run away from the job market we’ve entered into. And hopefully I’ll make it vaguely interesting. Hopefully.