It's goodbye from me...

Our intern Laura Davidson has left us early to start her year abroad in France. We want to wish her all the best. 
Here is her last blog, telling you all what she's done at TARGETjobs and what she's learnt. 

My internship here at TARGETjobs is coming to an end as I’m off to France next week for my year abroad. I thought I’d give you an overview of the work I’ve been doing here over the last three months and some of the things I’ve learned before I say au revoir.

So, what do we interns actually do at TARGETjobs? For a start, I can assure you that it’s not making cups of tea and photocopying all day. It’s definitely been a mixed bag of tasks. I’ve worked on careers sectors including law, engineering and property – so as well as improving my writing style both for print and online, I’ve picked up knowledge about the industries themselves. This winter, I’ll be applying for law vac schemes, so getting involved in the law publication in particular has been really valuable, as it’s given me real food for thought in terms of the areas of practice I’m interested in, the firms I might like to work for, and submitting applications.

Another good chunk of our time has been spent on the Guardian UK 300, conducting interviews with recent graduates in different careers, writing these interviews up into articles, and compiling the list of top graduate employers. The interview side of things was engaging and something totally new to me; I really enjoyed finding out about different graduates’ career experiences first-hand and transforming the interviews into articles with really useful info.

One of the key tasks for us over the summer has been working on the TARGETjobs content management system – OK, it doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s essential for getting all that online content across to you! It’s a long process but knowledge of how a company’s website is run, organised and accessed by users is a skill to show off to employers, and one that might set you apart from other candidates in certain industries.

At the halfway stage of my degree, the internship here has been invaluable for advice on CVs, interviews, applications and so on. Chatting to different people at work has given me some really handy tips – contrary to what I thought, I do have a worthwhile range of experience and skills, it’s just about how I use and present them to convince employers that they should consider me. Also, it’s helped me recognise my strengths and focus on what I want to do. I’ve had a great experience and learned a lot, so thanks to everyone here!

The phantom student

On my way into work this morning I was chatting with a friend about our university friends’ summers, and what everyone was up to.

Number one is on an internship with a Magic Circle law firm, hoping to gain a training contract.

Number two is lining up for a three-week placement in investment banking.

Number three is at an internship with a TV news network.

Numbers four, five and six are on sponsored internships at university doing research projects.

Number seven had a couple of weeks’ placement at an advertising company.

The gent who was in the car next to me is just finishing a week-long placement at NME, having spent a fortnight at Prospect magazine.

This list goes on, I’m sure, but my memory isn’t good this early in the morning. The point is that everyone seems to be doing something that will increase their chances of employment, one way or another. If you asked any of them today, however, how confident they feel about getting a job after graduation next June, not one would give you an answer that belied any semblance of surety. Why? We are all haunted by the fear of the imaginary ‘Other’, the phantom student that we all know is out there, somewhere, pulling 70-hour-weeks in the library, captaining the University’s First XV, acting as Treasurer for an impossibly successful student society, and devoting every university-free moment to developing contacts within a chosen industry. He or she will graduate summa cum laude at exactly the same time as us, walk into the company we liked most, take the job we wanted, and sit there, leering at us, smug as a cat who’s had the cream, the goldfish out of the tank and a sizeable pinch of cat-nip as well for good measure.

As a result of this fear, things start to get crazy in terms of extra-curricular activities at university. Number one is captaining the University’s First XI this year. Number two is the chemistry school president. I’m not sure about numbers four and five, but numbers three, six and seven all hold senior positions in strong student societies. The aforementioned gent is the editor of an online student publication. I have a school friend who started his own record label and another who is a published author, not even touching upon the ones that are going to be lawyers.

The question then becomes, ‘how do you deal with this?’ How do you watch your school friends and university friends succeeding without breaking into a nervous sweat about your own inadequacy every time you measure yourself against them?

It all comes down to planning ahead. Have a goal: a career or even a broad sector that you think you will enjoy working in after graduation. Once you have that goal, start working out what you can do to make yourself irresistible to the graduate recruiters you will one day be sat across the table from. Get involved with a relevant student society or two at an early stage and start working out how you will get to the top. Develop your soft skills through socialising and team-work. Mine the TARGETjobs website for every last scrap of useful information (there’s loads). Apply for work experience placements and internships in the summer, even if you’re planning on going travelling or on holiday; a week’s work experience placement won’t be too hard to squeeze in somewhere during a university break.

As well as the planning, there will inevitably be some things that fall unequivocally down to the hand of fate: a chance encounter, a momentary flash of inspiration or a sudden opportunity. During the address at a prize-giving ceremony at school years ago, the speaker explained her success – how she had risen so far in her field. “Take every opportunity that presents itself to you; grab it with both hands, whatever it is…you can work out what to do with it later.” The gist of this sentence wasn’t tricky to understand. Carpe diem, in the words of Horace, which now, thanks to a depressed cat that’s finally had a breakdown and is now convinced he’s a dog, will forever be translated as ‘grab the frisbee’.

However, this frisbee-grabbing, car-chasing, water-loving, broken cat (unfortunately) epitomises what I’m saying. If you know what you want, go and get it. When you do, and you stand again next to the yardstick of your peers, you won’t be disappointed with how you measure up. Here’s your soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9kCCLwEga8

Go on, be more dog. 

Haven't done any internships? You can still make your CV look good!

Towards the end of university one of my friends and I would regularly lock ourselves in a battle of self-deprecating one-upmanship. She’d complain that no-one would hire her because she’d be an arts graduate, I’d lament that no-one would hire me because I hadn’t done any ‘proper’ work experience, she’d respond that she’d be an arts graduate and had no work experience and was therefore positively doomed. It went on until we would both happily agree that we’d both probably spend the rest of our lives shining shoes for a living and using our degree scrolls for kindling.

When we spoke about ‘those’ people who’d been unequivocally proactive and done numerous internships during the summer (instead of gallivanting off travelling like us) we’d accompany the conversation with a customary eye-roll. We had no chance next to go-getters like them.

So, as it went, my CV remained one page long, as it had been ever since my teenage self bashed it together to display a list of my GCSEs in size 16 font. Even up until I started my internship here, it was still only one page long – given with a few added jobs and slightly smaller print (a respectable 12 Times New Roman). I always thought that because I’d only ever done run-of-the-mill part-time jobs, I didn’t really have any experience worth showing off.

However, the research I’ve been doing here at TARGETjobs has made me realise that I might not have done any traditional placements at uni, but I picked up a lot of skills from my various other endeavours – skills worth showing off. In my last blog I talked about some of the jobs I’ve had over the past few years. These were listed on my CV followed by a single sentence describing the role. I thought that this was all pretty satisfactory, I mean, how much can you really say about working on a checkout? Well, it turns out a lot more than I thought. The trick is to break down each role into individual tasks and think hard about what specific qualities you need to undertake them.

So, if you worked in a shop:

• You could probably clock a grumpy customer a mile away: brow furrowed, lips pursed – the last thing you wanted to do was anything that would elicit an angry tirade resulting in the shift from hell. So you tried to be as helpful, competent and friendly as possible. Well in that case you understand the importance of excellent customer service skills don’t you?
• I bet there was always that one customer who barraged you with questions or had an annoyingly complicated problem that needed dealing with. You know what you probably did? You communicated effectively and efficiently, and were attentive to customer needs. 
• And who could forget the unadulterated stress of a Saturday afternoon in retail – I bet you had to work quickly and accurately under pressure.
• Chances are you weren’t running the shop by yourself – I’m sure you got some good team-working skills under your belt. 
• Were you responsible for cashing up the till at the end of the day? Well in that case you were considered honest, trustworthy and you were confident handling money and counting change.

So if like me you didn’t do any impressive high-flying work experience during uni, then don’t worry. Because those jobs you did do: waitressing, bar-tending, shelf-stacking, PR-ing – you didn’t get them done by standing there like a lemon. You’ll have displayed some worthy abilities and it’s just a matter of recognising them. Extra-curriculars such as sports, volunteering, class repping and societies are another goldmine for soft skills that you can flaunt on your CV. Write for a uni publication? Well don’t do what I did and put ‘wrote for a university publication.’ Show what you learnt:

Did you:

• contribute regular pieces? How many?
• monitor social media and the campus environment to devise potential stories?
• use initiative, news sense and knowledge of readership to pitch article proposals?
• work to tight deadlines?
• interview anyone or have to research anything?
• brainstorm with others to plan content?
• promote the publication over social media?

Remember, it’s all about analysing experience task-by-task. Even travelling can be a source of skills to show off. Recruiters will have piles of CVs to go through so they don’t want to have to figure out for themselves what you’re capable of. Show them! Of course, the skills you push on your CV will depend on what kind of job you’re applying to so visit the TARGETjobs website for some more in-depth advice or an example of what a graduate CV should look like.

As for my friend and I, we still like to pretend we’re heading for a life of impoverishment and despair, but that’s probably just because we’re arts graduates and have a flair for the dramatic.

Be gracious

When I was finishing my GCSEs at school great emphasis was placed upon work experience and its benefits when looking for a job. Not having a choice in the matter, my classmates and I all organised work experience placements as best we could, in industries that we thought might interest us.

I was fortunate enough to have a friend whose father worked as a commissioning editor at a London publishing house. The arrangements were made and I began my first ‘job’ in London. I loved everything about it. I was young enough for the commute to be vaguely exciting; the office was lively; and there were books everywhere! The editor I was shadowing had manuscripts that were several inches thick and held together by thick rubber bands piled two feet deep in his office, burying the two-seater sofa almost completely. And these, he told me in a mock-exasperated tone, were just from agents and addressed personally to him. The ‘slush pile’ – unsolicited manuscripts sent to the publishing house in the hope of being published – was far bigger.

I don’t remember too many of my tasks there, as it’s nearly six years ago now, but I do remember reading through several manuscripts in the slush pile. This exercise stuck with me, purely because of what was in there – there was a submission from an ex-marine commando describing, in sickeningly graphic detail, an ambush on a Hummer convoy in Afghanistan. There was one from a woman who had compiled a guide to life using advice from the late 1800s and early 1900s. One particular tip has stuck with me, and that is, ‘One must always make sure that one’s top hat is well polished before leaving the house.’ My reader report ran along the lines of ‘No, no, please, God, no.’ It wasn’t published. There was another from a Russian journalist who believed her government was trying to kill her, and was desperately trying to get her story published. She only gave her mobile number to be contacted on for ‘security purposes’. Convinced I had found a controversial and potentially best-selling manuscript, I rushed in to my editor, who read through the cover letter while listening to my explanation, then looked at me with a smile and said, ‘So you think we should risk the polonium here, do you?’ That one didn’t get published either.

Before I left, however, I asked to have a chat with my editor about the publishing sector in general. We sat down and discussed various things, but the single piece of advice which has stayed with me since then was, ‘Be gracious.’ I spent a long time thinking about it – largely trying to work out what gracious meant – and how to apply it. The synonyms include ‘kindly’, ‘courteous’, and, according to the OED, it is slightly archaic: it can be linked to the medieval notion of chivalry without too much effort.

The further I have gone through education since that conversation, the more I have realised its wisdom. Since having been involved with my university’s student newspaper, especially, I have seen how this advice applies very well to management and job-seeking. For example, I have conducted interviews for positions with candidates who were positively abrasive and who were unsuccessful in their candidacy purely as a result of their attitude. Similarly, as an editor, I have found that it is far easier to secure my team’s enthusiasm and loyalty by treating them kindly and courteously, as opposed to shouting at them and threatening them, so much so that I have never had to resort to the latter two options. I’m not saying that I treat everyone graciously – far from it, though I try my best. It is an ideal that I choose to strive towards. This might not be the right mindset for everyone, or every job, but it has worked for me so far.

There was a commencement speech video that went viral late last year entitled This is water, delivered by David Foster Wallace to the graduating cohort of Kenyon College. It goes slightly beyond ‘be gracious’, but speaks of the importance of how we choose to think. Worth a watch: http://dotsub.com/view/6b8cc93f-3b53-486b-a1ce-025ffe6c9c52

Hints and Tips on how to succeed as a student journalist

Our intern Craig is back with his second blog 

The Editorial: Part 2

Hello again. Following on from my last blog post, in which I talked about some of the more obscure opportunities available within student journalism, here are the promised hints and tips about how to succeed as a student hack. I am currently an editorial intern with TARGETjobs, and the editor of The Saint, St Andrews’ independent student newspaper. If you have any questions about what is mentioned below, or maybe something which isn’t, feel free to contact me at editor@thesaint-online.com

Journalism: Many famous names and faces started their careers on their student rags, and all look back on those times as among the best in their lives. Student journalism can be quite a harsh arena, but the time-worn adage of ‘you get out what you put in’ is seldom truer than in this case. You work hard and play harder. As is true of most societies, the friends you make can last a lifetime, and are bound to be useful contacts throughout your professional career.

You must be proactive to make the most of your time with a student newspaper. It is not enough to simply turn up at commissioning meetings and take an article or two to write when they are offered by the section editor. You should go into your section meetings with ideas, with interesting angles on a recent event, with scoops (as often as you can!!). This kind of enthusiasm will not go unnoticed, and will hopefully ease the way for your progression within the ranks of the paper. Not only that, but it will prepare you for the realities of journalism, where sub-editors compete for their by-lines at section meetings.

To find these ideas and scoops, follow all the local media outlets on Facebook and Twitter, and buy copies of the local papers when they come out. Check the university website for their (often daily) press releases and start building a network of contacts throughout the university – try and work out which friends study which subject or are in which society or team, or which officials sit on which panels and boards – you never know when it will be advantageous to you to have a name on the inside.

A large contact book/list is something which, as you progress in the industry, becomes increasingly of interest to employers, some of whom may ask about it specifically. A fantastic way to supplement this list is via the Gorkana Group, which sends out daily emails with details of promotions and new appointments within the industry by publication. Very quickly you can build up a list of the editors and writers at many of the dailies and trade magazines, which you can then follow on Twitter and, if the occasion calls for it, contact with regard to a story. Visit http://www.gorkana.com/journalists/media-alerts/ to sign up for these emails. Gorkana asks for your professional information in return; it is perfectly fine to supply them with your LinkedIn profile if you have one.

There are also national stories which can have a bearing upon your university. A fantastic way to keep abreast of these stories is Google Alerts: if a story breaks that meets certain criteria you have established (ie keywords such as St Andrews or Wills and Kate) then Google will send you a notification informing you, allowing you to be as on-the-ball as possible. These are just a few of the tools available to you – familiarise yourself with as many as possible and find out which ones work for you.

Socialise! Student journalists, who largely hail from Arts subjects like history, English or languages, are sociable animals who require frequent doses of the aqua vitae in order to survive. Go along to socials, introduce yourself, and start making friends. Some teams can be a bit cliquey, but perseverance will pay off.

Finally, be ambitious. Try and rise as far through the ranks as you can – the more responsibility you gain, the more appealing you will be to potential employers, so get stuck in and do whatever you can. Pull the all-day crash article writing sessions that end at 1.00am. Be that journalist on the end of the phone who just won’t go away (but be sure to stay on the right side of the law!) There is the potential for anyone at a student newspaper to make a name for themselves that they can carry forward into their professional career. You need determination, perseverance, and a good deal of nerve, but I have seen it happen – be that person – what buried secrets will you bring to light in the public interest?

If you have any questions about what is mentioned above, or maybe something which isn’t, feel free to contact me at editor@thesaint-online.com

Today’s journalism law tip: Court reporting: If you are reporting on a court case, there are several legal pot-holes you must avoid. Firstly, it is best to be present in the court for the trial. This way you can take notes for yourself about what is said and what happens. You can then publish a story using the quotes you have taken down (as long as you are happy that they are verbatim). This is important because it is illegal to use second-hand quotes (unless they are from official court press releases) in your articles, in case the quote is inaccurate and you are perpetuating a fallacy. Secondly, be 110% certain when you are citing charges brought against someone in court. It is best to go to the horse’s mouth for the wording of the charge – the CPS, who will provide the official wording of charges upon request. If you accidentally get a charge wrong, then the defendant has an open-and-shut case for libel, which could lead to legal action brought against your newspaper, so be careful!

[Disclaimer: This is intended as advice only; do not use it as an accurate set of instructions for court reporting. For more information check your local courthouse website and a journalism law textbook or website.]

I've graduated: what next?

Our intern Hollie has just graduated - congratulations! So what next? She is here to tell you. 
I graduated last week: robes were worn, champagne was drunk, tears were shed and scrolls were tossed ceremoniously in the air. I have to admit that I’m probably more proud of myself for not falling over on stage than for actually getting a degree, but unfortunately I’ve been advised against putting that under ‘achievements’ on my CV. Oh well.

Now that I have to reluctantly relinquish all ties to studenthood I’m back to giving some serious thought to what to do with, well, the rest of my life. The question I used to be bombarded with (‘so what are you going to do when you graduate?’) has now grotesquely mutated into an equally frightening apparition: ‘what are you doing now you’ve graduated?’

I’ve always envied people who’ve known what they want to do from the start, who’ve gone out and got the relevant experience they need and maybe even done internships with the company that they want to work with when they’re older. Alas life’s not always like that, and like me, most people leave uni without a clue about what they want to do. Personally I have enough trouble deciding what to eat for breakfast every day, let alone what I want to do for a living after I’ve finished my internship here.

My degree was in English literature and mathematics so at the moment I’m not faced with the most glaringly obvious career path. As you’ll have gathered from my last post, I don’t want to get involved with finance, and I’ve discovered that I potentially have the option to go into law, IT, management, retail, media, marketing, teaching – not to mention all the kinds of jobs out there that I probably haven’t even heard of. When there’s so much choice available it’s difficult to know where to start.

Some people have said to me that a job’s a job – getting up and doing a 9-5 slog to pay the bills is part of life and you just have to deal with it. But you know what? I’m a Chandler Bing and it’s going to take the Monica Geller of jobs for me to settle down.

To translate for the non-Friends watchers of you out there: I’m a bit of a commitment-phobe and if I’m not overly sold on something I won’t be able to stick with it. However I do know that if I am enjoying something I’ll be completely invested and will put my best efforts in. So I want a job that I know I’m going to enjoy, that will give me challenges that I want to face and that won’t leave me longing for the minute hand on the clock to tick just a little bit faster.

My editor here at TARGETjobs gave me some pretty good advice the other day: she told me to make a list of any jobs or work experience I’ve ever done before and then pick out what exactly I liked about each one. So far I have the following:

1)       Various waitressing jobs: dealing with people, making eye contact with Gerard Butler while working at the VIP suite at Murrayfield, and being paid cash in hand so I didn’t have to look at my bank balance.

2)       Volunteering with children in Morocco: doing something worthwhile that was helping other people while getting a kick-ass tan at the same time.

3)       My summer job cleaning out student houses: the incentive to get the job done quicker so I could leave earlier and the intrigue of never knowing what I’d find lurking under a bed.

4)       Transport surveyor: getting to wear a high-vis jacket, being outside in the fresh air and working in a different location every shift.

5)       Operating the checkouts at Tesco: chatting to customers and trying to guess what they were having for tea that night based on what was in their trolley.

6)       Writing for a student magazine and the Glasgow Journal newspaper: having a deadline to work to and being able to see my efforts as a finished product.

7)       Student ambassador: talking to potential undergraduates, promoting something I genuinely wanted to promote and getting to charge things to the uni expense account.

8)       Working on the lamb stall at a farmers market: nothing.

After writing that, although I’ve done some pretty diverse things, I can spot some recurring trends: I like variety, I like working with people and I like to have a goal to work towards. It’s a start. My next step is to spend the next few weeks doing as much career research as I can, find out what working in different sectors entails and look for roles that involve the qualities I just discovered I want. I’ll let you know how I’m doing in my next post…

If you too need help deciding what to do - try out our Careers Report. 

Applying for a job for the sake of it.

Our intern Hollie, shares her experience of why applying for a job in an industry you are actually interested in is essential 

When my final year at Glasgow Uni was drawing to a close it suddenly hit me that in a few weeks I would suddenly be a real person: a tax-paying, student-loan-free real-life person. When friends and family asked me what I was doing when I graduated I could no longer brush them aside with ‘but that’s aaaages away’ because it wasn’t – it was very, very soon. I panicked. I’d always found the prospect of applying for a graduate job quite intimidating, but suddenly when I found an e-mail circulated around my course advertising a scheme at HSBC my adrenaline kicked in.

My first mistake was the time at which I applied. My dissertation was due in two weeks and I had a maths report to do even before that - but I rationalised it by saying to myself that ‘I was at university so that I could get a job, and so job applications were just as important as my uni work’. Wrong. I spent an afternoon writing a covering letter, filling in the application questions and sprucing up my CV. Then, I spent another long session practising for the psychometric test they asked me to do. When I passed that I then had to spend an entire day learning about banking for the phone interview I was due to have - because that was my second mistake: I’d put no thought into what I wanted to apply to and realised that not only did I have no knowledge whatsoever about the finance industry, I also had absolutely no interest in it. It took me a full 12 hours and copious cups of coffee to force myself to read through tedious statistics, news stories and lengthy press releases about banking and the economy.

When it came to the day of my phone interview I felt so sick with nerves I kept forgetting to breathe, and when my phone rang I almost threw it under the bed. It all went downhill from there. The first question the woman asked me was merely to re-iterate the name of the exact graduate programme I’d applied for – I was so wound up I couldn’t remember. I had to fumble with the paperwork on my desk frantically until I found a copy of the application form. The second thing she asked me was to select a recent news story that involved HSBC and talk her through it - I’d only briefly scanned a few. I had to fish in my brain for the one I remembered best and find a creative way to expand what was effectively one sentence’s worth of information into an intelligent, knowledgeable-sounding answer. This prompted the first of many instances when I was left with nothing much to say after about 20 seconds. Question after question I was forced to tail off into silence and wait until the interviewer realised that no, the phone hadn’t cut out; I just genuinely had nothing to say.

The interview was supposed to be 40 minutes long, and it’s safe to say mine only lasted 20. Amongst the plethora of awkward, grimace-inducing silences I’d been faced with many questions that I didn’t know how to answer and many more questions that I really didn’t care about knowing how to answer. In short, I realised I wouldn’t have wanted the job even if i’d (miraculously) gotten it.

So, if blogs were the Aesop’s fables of the modern world, the moral of this story would be this: make sure you know what you want to do, before you do it. Sounds simple enough right?  If you can’t bear a 40 minute conversation about the subject matter, then you certainly won’t want to be immersed in it every single weekday for the foreseeable future. If I could go back in time, I would tell myself to start thinking about what I wanted to do while I was still in my second or third year instead of leaving it until the last minute (mine was a four-year course). I would have saved myself all that post-interview hyperventilating if I’d just given some consideration to what I actually wanted to use my degree for. I assumed that with maths I’d probably end up working with numbers; what I didn’t realise was that I could also go into IT, marketing, law – in fact I know now that there are bucket loads of graduate schemes on offer that don’t require a specific degree discipline. Also, a lot of graduate schemes have application deadlines earlier in the year and if I knew I could have applied at a much more convenient time.

When I finally did do an interview for a job that I actually wanted, well, it wasn’t intimidating at all – I really quite enjoyed it! So, readers, go forth and research what’s out there - otherwise you’ll end up knowing far more than you’d ever care to about equity capital markets…

Cheers,

Hollie 

Meet the TARGETjobs interns

Our summer editorial interns are in the building. They will be blogging this summer letting you know more about themselves and their time spent at TARGETjobs together with some helpful tips on employability. Hope you all join me in giving them a big warm TARGETjobs welcome.

Here they are:

Hi, I’m Harriet. I’m currently in between my second and third years at Durham University. This summer I’m working as an editorial intern here at TARGETjobs in Wallingford until my term starts again in October. At university I study English literature, co-run a student theatre company, work on my college’s toastie bar, write for various uni publications and have researched and presented for Durham Student TV. Over the past few months I’ve really started to think about what I’m going to be doing the year after next and of possible ways to avoid staying in my pyjamas all day and eating ice cream for every meal. This seems to be a good time to begin planning and refining my answer to the question ‘what do you want to do after graduation?’ from ‘yeah… um, the media?’ to something less likely to kill a conversation. Lots of you will, I expect, be in the same boat as me – or similar ones. I’ll be sharing my findings about the graduate world that is fast approaching, as well as writing about my thoughts and experiences from here at TARGETjobs.  

Hi, I’m Hollie. I’ve just graduated from Glasgow University and I’m an editorial intern here at TARGETjobs. I took the ‘scenic route’ through higher education – a change in unis and a switch of courses meant that I was a student for over five years. As a result the thought of entering the real world is slightly daunting! Now I have a degree in mathematics and English literature under my belt, and like some of you I’m in the process of looking for a graduate scheme that appeals to me. I’m going to be spending the next few months researching what’s on offer and applying to various things so I’ll be keeping you updated on my progress. The application process can be scary as there’s often a lot of competition and rigorous interviews but the important thing is to keep trying. Most people have to apply for a few different jobs before they’re successful so just remember to see any rejections as good practice runs for the future. I’ve already had one pretty disastrous interview but stay tuned and I’ll tell you all about that later!  If you have any questions about my hunt for graduate employment you can get in touch with me at hgjones1102@gmail.com or @chocaholliec.

Interesting fact: I once shaved my head for charity and spent the following few months resembling a potato

Hi there, I’m Craig. I’m an editorial summer intern for TARGETjobs currently working with the editors on productions such as Guardian UK 300 and TARGETjobs IT & Technology.

I am a fourth year student of English and Latin at the University of St Andrews and the editor-in-chief of the independent student newspaper, The Saint. In previous summers I have been fortunate enough to work briefly in the editorial departments of different publishing houses and I am now confident that I want to pursue a career in editorial. So, if you’re interested in student journalism and/or publishing, read on, and I’ll share what I’ve learned so far about the two industries. I’ll also keep you updated with what it’s like to be an intern for TARGETjobs and what makes working for a media company like GTI different to working in newspaper offices and publishing houses.

Interesting fact: This summer I will be wading through McNae's Essential Law for Journalists; if you’re a wannabe hack, watch this space for legal minefields and how to avoid them!

Slightly more interesting fact: I am a keen fan of drag racing, and head to Santa Pod whenever I can!

Hi bloggers, I’m Laura and I’m one of the editorial interns at TARGETjobs. I’ll be working here over the next couple of months and will keep you posted on my experience. Currently, I’m half way through my degree in Law with study in continental Europe at the University of Bristol. This means that over the summer, alongside working here at TARGETjobs, I’ll be frantically trying to keep up my French reading (or not) for my year abroad at the University of Poitiers starting in September.

Luckily, this also means I’ve still got two whole years to go before I seriously need to focus on graduate jobs and my career path, which seems a long time now, but, as I’ve been reminded repeatedly by parents, teachers and lecturers, preparation is key! I don’t have a job at uni as the hours just don’t allow for it, but during the holidays, I’ve done various jobs and work experience placements, on which I’ll say more in a later post (if you can handle the suspense…)

At the moment I’m weighing up a career in journalism and the more obvious (though far from easy) route into legal practice. Often my thoughts on what I want to do after graduating change literally from one day to the next, so I am by no means set on a specific career path as yet! However, I’m looking forward to sharing my insights into the big wide world of work with you over the next few months.

If you have any questions or want to know more information, feel free to email me at lauradavidson1993@hotmail.co.uk or follow my blog http://laurasbookcase.blogspot.co.uk/

Laura