I had always considered the question ‘What do you want to do in life’ one of the hardest to answer, for that there were too many possibilities and I didn’t know if there was one perfect answer.

But not anymore, because I have the answer for myself now.I can’t really say it is the perfect one, but at least I have found a fairly satisfying answer for now.

I want to be a newsreader on TV, presenting in English.

Two weeks into my internship at Phoenix TV, still unpaid, still just an intern, I have realised how lucky I am. I’m actually doing something I like, and I feel positive about my future.

I’ve been working as an assistant producer (and they actually put my name in the end credits of the daily news programme too!!) for the daily 20-minute news programme, writing news scripts, editing video footages and doing news voiceovers. I enjoy it because I’m learning something new from the news everyday and I see my accomplished work broadcast.

However, I want to do more. It is fantastic working on the multimedia side because it is almost exactly what I learnt from my degree, but it’s not enough for me. As well as editing news, I also want to make my own news, come up with ideas, go out to find stories and interview people. Unfortunately as an intern that is something I cannot either control or demand, but I do spend a few minutes everyday slouching in my chair starring into the sky out of the 7th floor French window next to my desk, wishing that I was out reporting.

And then the ultimate goal is to be a news reader on TV. But everything has to come at a time, as a Chinese saying goes, you can’t become chubby with just one bite – I suppose it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in English, but what it means is that you have to take time to achieve what you want, not that I actually want to put on weight. Of course not.

It is now September again. But no longer a student I am. Things are about to change.

On the train to London, I found myself starring into the trees flying past the window, so fast, they looked like hundreds of parallel lines.

It was an interesting moment. I was as if completely sucked into a space of nothingness, but also, enjoying it. It wasn’t exactly a moment of quietness and peace, but something like that.

After an exhausting summer – doing a fulltime 12-weeks placement, looking for jobs, not getting jobs, getting very depressed about not getting jobs – I was here, on the train to London, where I’ll be starting another unpaid fulltime internship, I found that finally, here was a moment I could sort of relax, or rather, to stop worrying, fearing, and stressing. Actually, I could stop thinking altogether – because the decision is already made.

I was thinking nothing. And believe me that felt good.

I’m glad that I made my choice. It might not be the best, but I’ll hope for and try the best.

And there is pressure, always mounting pressure.

For me it’s hard not to compare with others. I graduated a year ago with a Bachelor’s degree, and decided to go on to do a Master. Whereas some of my then university friends have been working and changing for better jobs since graduation.

Others like me, who continued with their education, some are lucky enough to have found jobs already; some will have a very promising degree-related future; and some are still struggling, sort of like me.

Everybody wants to move on with their life and enter the next phase fairly quickly. Well at least some of us do. And I can’t help thinking that somehow, I’m already left behind.

However, having experienced so many uncertainties and difficulties, there is one thing that I do not regret. That is I completed a Master’s degree. I’m actually proud of it. I did what I enjoyed doing, and I made the most out of it. Some others may have been one step ahead of me in many aspects, but I wouldn’t change my choices for theirs, because it is my life, and I make my own future.

…there is a way. How I wish when there is a will, there is a JOB!
Oh well, so here is my way – going to London.

After having constantly felt depressed about everything in my life – job, money, future…and job, and money…I finally found something –

A two-month, unpaid, full time internship.

It is for a Mandarin TV channel based in London, and they are in fact the only company that responded to my desperate job-seeking emails.

And for that I am extremely grateful.

My London choice will give me difficulties of course, let alone accommodation, visa and finance, the most important question being where this internship leads me to in two months’ time?

I don’t know.

My friends are very encouraging and they all tell me it is a good start. Yes it is. But will there be a good end?

The truth is, ability is something but really NOT everything in the real world. Having experienced and heard of so many stories, I now have to admit that luck does play a very important role, from time to time.

But anyway, what’s going to happen next, I’ll have to see for myself, in London!

By the way, I did enjoy my degree very much – international multimedia journalism. Of all the skills I’ve learnt, one of my proudest is this –

www.aiyangmedia.com

So this is going to be the first of my posts that ends with no news, no work tips, no job hunting slash failing stories, no what so ever. This is a genuinely confused person’s genuine confusion slash complaint.

In this life threatening May, amid my four untouched assignments, two work meetings, one group meeting and one soon or never birthday party (can’t really miss this one coz it’s mine…), I come to find that all I’m capable of doing is wondering, and wondering, that what kind of job should I go for?

A job linked to my degree, because why did I take on this hellish expensive Master’s in the first place otherwise? Or just any job, any job that I manage to find in this gleeful spree of global recession?

I have no idea. Well maybe I do. Of course if you like Reebok you wouldn’t go buy Nike, but in a situation of shoe or no shoe, I guess any shoe will do – unless you want to walk bare footed.

Going through my all-failing job applying history, I find that I have applied for lots of, actually, nothing but only, international language requiring jobs, but not, I’m afraid, because of my international language ability, but rather, my English disability.

But I never ever even considered media jobs – and that is my degree. I’m a journalism student for crying out loud! In fact, I’m a journalism student, who’s pretty much convinced that she’s not going to get a journalism job.

But then I start to really ask myself, if I ever did get a language job, would I really enjoy it? What if a few years later I want to go back to my media career and find I have no relevant experience?

Or maybe I would enjoy it, because after all I’ve done something similar and I always enjoy what I do. But will I ever wonder, that had I aimed at my dream career from the beginning would I have achieved something better, something I know that I’m capable of, something I know that I have a talent for?

So, would you consider yourself lucky, if you, compared to others, know what you want, or is that really a curse, because whatever else you do, a voice inside will always say – but this is not what I wanted…?

Well, not a real job, but a full time placement at NcjMedia working on the papers. I’ve just started today, and I loved the experience.

07:00 Alarm goes off. Press snooze button.

07:30 Alarm goes off for the third time, crawl out of bed for appointment at 10:00 to start work placement. Feel reluctant, especially after the one our loss due to time changing, it is actually only 06:30. Darn it!

09:00 Ready to leave. Can’t breathe.

09:40 Find self waiting at reception. Still can’t breathe.

09:45 A girl sits down next to me, turns out she’s also here to start placement. Nervousness lessens by 1 pc.

10:00 Been taken to the Editorial Department, shown my own desk (Ok it’s not mine, I’m only temporarily occupying it when the real owner is away). It’s a proper news desk, just like the ones I see in films!

10:00 A colleague throws me a tennis ball. I catch it, throw it back. Nervousness lessens by 2 pc.

10:30 Leave desk to cover news (if any) at the Magistrate Court in town with a colleague.

12:30 Theft, drink driving, assault, harassment and threatening ex-boyfriend. Nothing too interesting. Feel so glad I didn’t skip my Media and Law lectures and the trip to the Crown Court last semester so I actually have an idea of what is going on. Realise lectures are there for a reason after all.

12:45 Back in the office. Talk to senior editor about my idea for a feature of an event I worked at last week. Get permission to work on it.

13:00 Start emailing current employer for permission to use photos, video and audio interviews I took last week. Permission granted. Start to get excited about writing a feature on my own!

13:30 Get my interview materials in the email. Think the quotes so good, but don’t know who were the people I’ve interviewed!! Have learnt I should always, always take note of all details.

14:00 Get another task. Am sent off on the street to do Vox Pop. Have to find 6 people and ask them what is their favourite place in the North East and why. Need to get their photo and personal details.

15:00 Camera broken. Go back to change camera.

15:30 Job done. This is much easier compared to my old sales job when I had to walk up to strangers and try selling them credit cards. Instead of trying to take down everything people said and take photos at the same time, I ask them to fill in my self-made pre-interview form: name, age, favourite place, etc., for I wouldn’t be able to spell everything right and would have been wasting time asking people to repeat their answers.

16:00 Back to the office again. Write up the vox pop and photo captions. A colleague helps me upload my work from WORD to their own system. Looks too professional and I fail to memorise none of the entire processs which happens all in the split of a second.

16:05 Editor says I can go home but I say I want to stay. Continue to develop my feature idea.

16:20 Come up with lots of ideas, have written 0 word, don’t know how to start.

16:40 Complete successful telephone interview with employer regarding event last week. Really enjoy holding the phone between my chin and shoulder while asking questions and typing everything down feverishly all at once. For a moment, I feel like a proper journalist, and that’s so cool.

17:00 Have collected all information I need, word count remains 0. Decide to go home and write in own time.

18:00 Arrive at home. Eat packed lunch prepared for 5 hours ago.

20:45 Word count remains 0. But have just written another blog!

Now Will try writing the long overdue feature, and look forward to tomorrow!

Having completed my 100 hour NWE contract working as a language learning materials producer, I now have more friends, more work experience, a better looking CV, and most importantly, another contract with my employer.

They liked my work, so they decided to give me some more work to do. Although I’d love to work full time for them, at the moment continuing working on a part time basis is the best possible result I have achieved.

I am one of the 4 people out of the original 12 who have been offered another contract since completion of our project. Honestly, before I started my first hour, I thought this was going to be a boring job – judging from the job title – language learning materials producer, what’s fun about that?

I was wrong. It turned out that it depends very much on myself whether I want to make my job exciting or not – there’s always things to do-

Exploring. Learning. Talking to others.

They are what have made my job exciting. It sounds so simple, yet sometimes simple things are the hardest to realise.

Having a job is nothing but a beginning. The important thing is to know when to take the next step – to develop your skills, to show what others don’t have, and to let your role grow from someone who does the job, to someone the job needs to have.

And you don’t have forever to prepare. If you don’t take your chance, others will. Simples!

Since January I’ve been looking for a new work opportunity because my previous work experience was near completion at the time. Luckily, I’ve recently found another placement in the media sector after a month’s hopeless searching. And now I summarised a little step-to-step guidance on how to find an internship, according to my very own awkward experiences.

Step 1 involves numerous hand-sweating, heart-pumping phone enquiries. A very personal tip is to

avoid making long sentences sound like one word

which is usually caused by a high degree of nervousness. Do NOT babble yourpreparedlittletelephonespeechwithoutstopping, take a breath in between.

Step 2 employs your perfect (or torturously scrambled, whichever) cover letter. Send it off as soon as possible once you get the contact’s email address, even if the answer they give you is not definite.

Step 3 challenges your persistency as well as patience. Don’t be obvilious about your own effort if no news arrives in the next couple of weeks. By this time you are half way to success so keep the spirit up and follow-

Step 4, which is to work up the courage once more and pester your contacts again and again (with reasonable intervals in between), until you get a definite
a) Yes – steps completed in advance and congratulations you got the job! Or,
b) No – then go to,

Step 5 Try another company. Prepared for occasions such as b) above, this step can’t be simpler as you’ve been very experienced with the whole procedure by now – just repeat steps 1 to 4, until someone says yes.

And eventually success will come.

However stupid this guidance may sound, one day you finally get an offer you may find sometimes seemingly stupid way works best. Good luck!

Let me make this one short and sweet.

If you have so much free time that you are actually reading this blog, I think you should instead invest sometime in this website:

Prospects – Explore Types of Jobs

As that might in fact be a lot more helpful than what you read here (believe me I’m trying hard to squeeze out some interesting stories, but I just really can’t – loads of applications sent with no responses after a month doesn’t sound funny no matter how humourous or sarcastic a person you are).

Anyway…I discovered this fantastic website while looking for jobs, and it is really useful because the website tells you what people do exactly in all types of jobs. For example if you are studying a degree in journalism (I give you my condolence if you are unlucky as me, for jobs in the media industry are expected to fall by a third this year), but always wondered if PR and HR jobs suit you at all, click on the link above, type in ‘human resource’, or whatever job title it is that you want to learn more of, then you will get a detailed list of information.

The two most useful tips I find are ‘job descriptions’ and ‘typical work activities’, because with their help I know how to highlight relevant information on my CV and cover letter, also I know I won’t ask stupid questions such as ‘So what do you PR people do exactly?’ in future interviews, if, that day ever comes.

The website also provides information on salary, entry requirements, career development, vacancy sources, and even contacts and case studies!

Since it is now officially recession time and there are more people losing rather than finding jobs, it may be worth it to spend some time thinking what else you’d like to work as if the dream job is looking less likely, which is very much my case.

Image from www.youllputyoureyeout.com

Last week I had coffee with my friend Marc, a Newcastle graduate who has studied Chinese in Shanghai for a year. Now back in England with fluent Chinese (sort of), he’s working on his fledging but ambitious business plan – selling Macbook Air (the thinnest laptop ever made, I think) worldwide.

When he was in China, he somehow established connection with a Macbook Air manufacturer, who’s willing to sell laptops to him at a low price of GBP600 (usually they are more than a grand). He told me now he’s going to resell them for more, making a pure profit of GBP100 for each sell.

Connection/relationship/networking is the English equivalent of the Chinese word ‘guanxi‘. It can be such a powerful act in China (and now obviously worldwide too) that the term itself is recorded by Wikipedia. Well, I guess we can’t really be blamed for taking advantage of people relationships, after all we have 1.3 billion people, what do you expect?

Anyway, back to Marc’s story. He’s already been approached by a buyer who claims will buy 20 laptops off him monthly. Interestingly, this buyer is himself based in China, but Marc’s price is the cheapest he can get hold of. So he has to wait for Marc to import the laptops from China to England first, and then to export them back to China again ! Well, without ‘guanxi‘, that’s how long you have to wait I’m afraid.

After listening to Marc’s glorious victory, I feel pretty limp about my own connections, which only allow me to toil at 10 quid an hour to teach Chinese to my boyfriend’s flatmate’s girlfriend’s boss’s son. Sixty nine more hours to go if I’m to buy a Macbook Air off Marc.

You may have come to the conclusion that it’s not only WHAT you know (Chinese in both cases), but also WHO you know. However, using ‘guanxi‘ is not shameful at all. Haven’t you noticed that ‘networking’ is what people are looking for nowadays on facebook, apart from ‘dating’ and ‘friendship’? ‘Guanxi‘ is simply the less intimidating and more plain version of the dazzling term ‘PR’.

Worry not if you feel you haven’t got the ‘guanxi‘ or network or whatever factor. The connections are provided for you. Visit Careers Service’s North East Graduate Directory or Graduate Connections for contacts database. You can either directly contact previous graduates or the employers you want to work for in the North East.

So now you’ve got them both, the ‘What You Know’ (hopefully) factor, and sometimes (and only sometimes) more importantly, the ‘Who You Know’ factor!

As a young, inexperienced university student hunting in the job market, you should work your way from the bottom up – better start with serving food in the pub.

That is if you are unimaginative. What I believe is this

The more bold the attempt, the more exciting the opportunity.

When my roommate Virginie failed the interview for a receptionist job in a Jesmond tennis club, she turned to target at something better.

And a few weeks later, she was offered another interview, with a slightly better place – the United Nations.

I still remember when she applied for the internship with the UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (she studies Disaster Management), she was asking me to check her CV but still felt she wasn’t good enough for them, saying, ‘I know this isn’t gonna work, but I’ll try anyway.‘

And it worked.

It turns out you don’t have to have a stunning CV to intern for the UN (but how ridiculously high the standard is sometimes for working in a pub serving fish and chips!).

I know this isn’t an ordinary path, but as a career starter, maybe, think bolder, aim higher – and you will be pleasantly surprised.

Well, the UN seems a pretty good place to start – If you have a look on the Internet, you’ll find that it actually offers quite a few internship opportunities for students (especially if you are doing a master’s) which run through a period of 1 to 4 months. The UNESCO offers similar internship programmes.

So back to Virginie’s story.

She turned the UN down.

It was because she was asked to work in Geneva for 6 months starting next January, but that would clash with her academic schedule.

But this wasn’t the end of the story. Virginie emailed them explaining her situation. Surprisingly, the staff expressed their interest in her again and agreed to reserve an interview for her whenever she’s available.

I know not all companies are so generous when it comes to flexibility. But here’s what I learnt from the GuardianJobs (weekly newspaper available at the entrance of Careers Service on second floor in Armstrong building)

Ask your past employer/tutor to write you a reference explicitly states that, with less flexibility, you’ve been as productive as those who enjoy more time. Don’t attempt to avoid talking about a difficulty until the end – no interviewer wants a nasty surprise just before recruiting you.