30th of March 2005

Its March, which means its graduate recruitment time. Its hard not to get caught up in all the hype. And becuase of this I now have enough pens and stress balls to last me untill I do get a job. Some times you think, is this all worth it. The amount of money spent on this graduate recruitment for essentialy a handfull of jobs, just seems a little excessive. On the other hand its quite informative. They pretty much tell you what they want to hear on the application and how to do interviews. Which I think is good preperation for this kind of job. Unless you are lucky enough to already have a job in that sort of "corporate" enviroment then its gona be hard to know what to expect. At least this way you have a chance to meet people who work there. Ask them questions. What their days are like etc. Takes a bit of the scaryness out of it all. The scaryness which is pressent after spending your entire known life studying. Having jobs before hand is obviously going to help a little, but I still think its different. Different how? Its a career as apposed to a job, where you are disposable and/or have little or no responsibility. You also get a lot more choice. Like the field of work you want to specialise in. Its not that its fixed and its easy to change but just initialy the first specialisation is important because its the one you will most likely do the most work in. Because you have to study that for your post grad studies. Of course if you change then you will proberly need to do more study... What I have learnt over the last few weeks is that I dont have to spend my time worrying about not having a job at the end of my degree. There are tons of jobs, and even if you dont like what you are doing you can change into something different.

The second most scary thing is the not knowing what you know or what you dont know but should know and/or not knowing you know or dont know. I have found out that the workplaces know we dont know anything. Which is scary becuase you just spent five years studying so that you would know something. I guess thats why having some work experiance counts, becuase atleast that way you arnt a total retard for the first year out.

Proberly the next step for me now is to work on my application, resume and cover letter. Apparently they like it if you atleast know what the name of the firm is...