Are You Experienced?

Like pretty much everyone my age, it has been drummed into me that a degree just isn’t enough these days: what everybody really wants from you is Experience. Work Experience. Experience of Working in the kind of place which you eventually want to Actually Work, not even Pretend Work. 

I think it’s safe to say that I am very experienced in failing to find Work Experience.

After writing what feels like thousands of begging letters (you know the type- “Im really totally fantastic and you will just love me for all these reasons, but I’m not really as full of myself as this letter makes me sound, honest!”) I know well the feeling of complete infuriation at being rejected, or worse: the agony of not even receiving a word of acknowledgement that anyone has bothered to read my beautifully crafted self- summary. 

It’s a paradox: companies tend to only offer work experience to people who have had previous experience. Or contacts. Tragically, I have neither in the field of work I am interested in. If only someone had said to my eight year old self: “Well that’s a pretty exciting ambition you’ve got there, but if I were you I’d STOP THE DREAM and train to be something very sensible like a maths teacher- they’ll have a shortage of those when you reach maturity.”

There was one Almost-Experience last summer. After sending out a lot of begging letters to various local and national newspapers (no harm in trying!), one Oxfordshire based free newspaper phoned me back. A mysterious man (who, come to think of it, may have had nothing to do with the paper at all!) very briefly and vaguely told me to meet him at a certain time the next day at his office. After setting out at the very crack of dawn on a bus through many twee villages, then walking for an hour in search of said office (no exaggeration), I realised I was very lost and had no phone signal. I ended the morning by sitting down at the side of a by-pass, having a good old girly cry.

Never-the-less, I have not packed in my journalism dreams and trained as a maths teacher. As the new year and the end of my degree kicks me in the face, I will once again send out the begging letters with the knowledge that this time, if anybody wants to give me a chance, I’ll be getting a taxi.

Written for theafternoonview magazine