Sometimes I find myself distracted from doing the things I should be doing - like reading George Eliot books and going to lectures on David Hume - by things that are marginally less important. I spend a lot of my life trawling the internet for places to try and do work experience, and it never goes particularly well.
I end up in rabbit-warrens of despair that all media work experience seems to fall into one of three categories:
1. Unpaid hovering
This is what all my work experience placements have technically been so far - turn up for a couple of weeks, watch people do things, try and be useful. I've managed to get a fair amount out of these though, from pretty much single-handedly generating a week's content for a magazine's website to interviewing a pop star. The problem is you don't get much hands-on experience, and usually expenses aren't paid. Even if I'm only commuting to London for a week, that still costs me about £80 in train fares.
2. Slave labour
The type where you get a job for three months with no pay and expenses only, and are expected to be grateful for the opportunity to do real work - and basically be a short-contract full-time employee - without any promise of further work, or actual help breaking into the sector. These are the sorts that annoy me the most. Science students seem easily able to get themselves paid internships over the summer, even with only a year's academic experience under their belts; but arts demand that you grovel for the chance to make a mediocre writer's tea for twelve weeks.
3. Misadvertised jobs
The final sort are the ones which advertise themselves as "internships". They are not internships. They are year-long schemes for graduate students which will probably end up with permanent employment. They are actual jobs, operating on a year-long contract, which eternally succeed in getting my hopes up, before dashing them - because I'm not eligible to apply to them for at least another two years.
All of these are kinda shitty in their own ways, but type 2 is the worst. Not only is it elitist, by shouldering out of the sector anyone who can't afford three months of unpaid work, but it also devalues the contribution of the interns.
As a kid, growing up, I was taught that if I worked hard in school then I would go to a good university, and if I worked hard at university then I would get a good job and be able to make money doing what I love, and that would be that. I realised at 16 that life doesn't work like that and I couldn't just walk into a job after graduating the same way my dad did. If I want to make my money writing, I have to do it for free, and for a long time. It's one of the only jobs I know of where that's true.
Honestly, I will probably be a better writer by the end of my degree than I am currently, but it will have less to do with what I studied and more to do with the fact I've had an extra two years to hone my skills. As it is, I am probably a better writer than some graduates, because it is the thing I am good at - and there are going to be some high school students who are better writers than me, if that's the thing they are really good at.
I think we should just ban unpaid internships. Flat-out outlaw them. I'm sure I would be a valued member of your team, but why should I contribute as much as the snotty-nosed 24-year-old next to me when he's on £17,000 a year and I'm on £100 a week expenses?
The sad thing is, I know I'm going to do them. I want to challenge of working on real projects and getting my name in print beyond my brilliant student newspaper - but I also know I'm going to resent having a job and not being paid for it. Will we stand for this? No. But I might well sit at a computer all summer and type for it.
Showing posts with label jobs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jobs. Show all posts
Thursday, 20 February 2014
Thursday, 7 March 2013
Don't make me get a proper job.
I come from a family of smart people. Who did proper degrees with practical applications, and got proper jobs in the real world, and got married and had families and houses and mortages. And I'm not planning any of that. And that's fine.
My grandfather went to Oxford to study Maths. He applied after his two years of National Service in the army, where he taught illiterate prionsers to read in Scotland and helped with the repairs in Germany after WWII. Originally, he asked to study Natural Sciences, because he thought he wouldn't be smart enough to study Maths - but he got in, and he graduated and got a job and fell in love. He met my grandmother at a Roman pageant. She was dressed as an archer, he as a centurion; he gave her a lift home on the back of his motorbike, which he'd bought off a South African pole-vaulter at the 1948 Olympics who needed to pay his way back home. She fell in love with him, even though he started losing his hair at twenty-five.
Gran grew up in a poor household; apparently her father or grandfather gambled away all the family fortunes. She got a scholarship to a snooty school, and wanted to study History at university. But her little sister was a musical prodigy, her parents couldn't afford to put both of them through higher education, so she trained as a teacher at Homerton College. I'm pretty sure she got an honourary degree from Cambridge before she died. I'm glad. My grandfather would write software programmes, and she would write the manuals so people could comprehend them, but she had no interest in technology herself. She preferred people.
My mother was less academic than her brother, who studied as a vet in Edinburgh and married a civil servant, then a travel agent. Instead, she trained as a nurse and medical secretary, and stopped working to have a family and live in suburbia. In an attempt to prove the theory that women fall in love with men like their fathers, she married my dad: a software engineer, with an Oxbridge education (but rather more hair. And no motorbike).
Even my cousins are scientific. Gus has a phD in something to do with birds, and his wife is a doctor of spiders. Cat and her husband both studied chemistry, before being forced to drop out of university.
But really, it seems a bit like I exist only to be a contrast to my brother. He is skinny and athletic, all muscle and bone with not a molecule of fat on him. He worked hard at school and is in the third year of a Physics MA. He'll be spending the summer in Didcot, where his girlfriend works in a chemical engineering company. He's going to be working on nuclear fusion, which is a pretty big task for an undergrad. He doesn't really have plans for the future, but it's a fair guess he'll get a steady job, because physics graduates are always in demand. I'd like him to to marry his girlfriend and move to Coventry and have babies as geeky as they are, and a wilted lawn with toys strewn across it, and a lazy lapcat called Molly.
And then there's me. I am not skinny, nor athletic, instead exquisitely endomorphic with a fascinating topography. I spend all my time procrastinating, complaining when things don't go my way while simultaneously telling everyone to CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE!!! My plan for the summer is to travel around Asia for five and a half weeks before starting my degree in English and Philosophy. Then things get a bit hazy, but I'm almost sure I'll never get a proper job. And it certainly won't involve trying to solve a major energy problem. I'm more likely to move to New York, sink thousands of dollars into a post-graduate degree, and barely scrape a living as a freelance writer always dreaming of something more. I'm going to make a point of being every 'starving artist' cliche I can. Maybe I'll make a check list, so I can tick them off as I go.
I have nothing in common with my brother, but we get on pretty well.
But I always feel like a bit of the un-favourite in my family, like my parents prefer my brother because he's predictable and conventional and going to be a success. I'm more of a roulette. I honestly can't imagine ever living in the real world, full of bills and deadlines and social expectations. Maybe that's what appeals so much about writing: I can ensconce myself in a little bubble, where other people can only come if I invite them in. My family don't understand, but I don't understand how anyone could live working in an office from 9 till 5, so I guess we're even. Let me be a flake; just don't make me get a proper job.
But I wouldn't change them for the world - because I know my sensible, stable family will always be there to help me out. They'll give me a sofa to crash on, so I can figure out my life while they get on with theirs.
My grandfather went to Oxford to study Maths. He applied after his two years of National Service in the army, where he taught illiterate prionsers to read in Scotland and helped with the repairs in Germany after WWII. Originally, he asked to study Natural Sciences, because he thought he wouldn't be smart enough to study Maths - but he got in, and he graduated and got a job and fell in love. He met my grandmother at a Roman pageant. She was dressed as an archer, he as a centurion; he gave her a lift home on the back of his motorbike, which he'd bought off a South African pole-vaulter at the 1948 Olympics who needed to pay his way back home. She fell in love with him, even though he started losing his hair at twenty-five.
Gran grew up in a poor household; apparently her father or grandfather gambled away all the family fortunes. She got a scholarship to a snooty school, and wanted to study History at university. But her little sister was a musical prodigy, her parents couldn't afford to put both of them through higher education, so she trained as a teacher at Homerton College. I'm pretty sure she got an honourary degree from Cambridge before she died. I'm glad. My grandfather would write software programmes, and she would write the manuals so people could comprehend them, but she had no interest in technology herself. She preferred people.
My mother was less academic than her brother, who studied as a vet in Edinburgh and married a civil servant, then a travel agent. Instead, she trained as a nurse and medical secretary, and stopped working to have a family and live in suburbia. In an attempt to prove the theory that women fall in love with men like their fathers, she married my dad: a software engineer, with an Oxbridge education (but rather more hair. And no motorbike).
Even my cousins are scientific. Gus has a phD in something to do with birds, and his wife is a doctor of spiders. Cat and her husband both studied chemistry, before being forced to drop out of university.
But really, it seems a bit like I exist only to be a contrast to my brother. He is skinny and athletic, all muscle and bone with not a molecule of fat on him. He worked hard at school and is in the third year of a Physics MA. He'll be spending the summer in Didcot, where his girlfriend works in a chemical engineering company. He's going to be working on nuclear fusion, which is a pretty big task for an undergrad. He doesn't really have plans for the future, but it's a fair guess he'll get a steady job, because physics graduates are always in demand. I'd like him to to marry his girlfriend and move to Coventry and have babies as geeky as they are, and a wilted lawn with toys strewn across it, and a lazy lapcat called Molly.
And then there's me. I am not skinny, nor athletic, instead exquisitely endomorphic with a fascinating topography. I spend all my time procrastinating, complaining when things don't go my way while simultaneously telling everyone to CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE!!! My plan for the summer is to travel around Asia for five and a half weeks before starting my degree in English and Philosophy. Then things get a bit hazy, but I'm almost sure I'll never get a proper job. And it certainly won't involve trying to solve a major energy problem. I'm more likely to move to New York, sink thousands of dollars into a post-graduate degree, and barely scrape a living as a freelance writer always dreaming of something more. I'm going to make a point of being every 'starving artist' cliche I can. Maybe I'll make a check list, so I can tick them off as I go.
I have nothing in common with my brother, but we get on pretty well.
But I always feel like a bit of the un-favourite in my family, like my parents prefer my brother because he's predictable and conventional and going to be a success. I'm more of a roulette. I honestly can't imagine ever living in the real world, full of bills and deadlines and social expectations. Maybe that's what appeals so much about writing: I can ensconce myself in a little bubble, where other people can only come if I invite them in. My family don't understand, but I don't understand how anyone could live working in an office from 9 till 5, so I guess we're even. Let me be a flake; just don't make me get a proper job.
But I wouldn't change them for the world - because I know my sensible, stable family will always be there to help me out. They'll give me a sofa to crash on, so I can figure out my life while they get on with theirs.
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