Spend your summer hunting for jobs: yey!

[box]Jessie Lawson[/box]

In my mind, summer is the best time of year. It’s the time of freedom and prospects. Revision and a fixed schedule is replaced by constantly seeing friends, planning for festivals and travelling, all with the beautiful backdrop of long days and hot sun. Summer is rife with opportunity.

This summer, however, all I really need is a job. Not only can I only do the things I want to do with money – something I admit with the deepest resentment – but I actually really need to be employable. University doesn’t last forever. Sooner than I know, I’m going to be in the real world needing a real job. If I don’t have experience, I’m fucked.

I promise. I’m not an unorganised person. I actually got very excited about my job hunting. Way before exams even started I was creating my very own perfect CV. Every little job I’d had was made to look fantastic, and my brand new copy of InDesign PIMPED the layout. A nerdier, more computer based version of Tim Westwood would have wet himself in envy.

There started the fifty plus emails.

I’ll admit I was slightly too optimistic. These were aimed at places where I’d actually like to work. Every independent magazine and left wing newspaper based where I live was contacted. Let’s be honest, they were never going to pay me. Another undergraduate arts student desperate to make their own – utterly unique – indent on the world. Best I was going to get was a month’s ‘internship’ that ‘covered travel expenses’ and consisted of a joyful alternation between serving coffee and photocopying bank statements. Now that’s not getting me to Bestival is it.

So I get home and make use of the printer. Everyone knows employers like the personal touch. I worked out where I could get to in an hour in all directions from my house and every bar, pub, restaurant and shop within that radius was directly handed my CV, accompanied by a (hopefully) very endearing smile.

It seems that people just don’t want to hire me. What’s the point in hiring a student (with experience, I might add) to tend bar when everyone knows they’ll fuck off again as soon as uni starts? And that’s generous – it’ll probably happen as soon as they’ve made enough money to last the rest of the summer. Admittedly, this is exactly what I want to do. It’s just unfortunate that the reasons I want a job are the same reasons that I can’t get one.

Well, good news is I’m now free as a bird. I have all the time in the world to think about how much I can’t do. It’s also raining cause, oh wait, summer doesn’t even come to the UK. All that’s really left for me to do is try the whole thing again.

So you want thirty days of summer activities? Spend every day handing out CVs. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll get an interview just in time for you to return to uni for the start of next semester … have fun guys!