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| Tales of innocence and experience |
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Ever naively assumed journalism would be a heady cocktail of interviews, exclusives and learning tricks of the trade? Five students share tales of boredom, mortification and desperation in their pursuit of the perfect work experience Mairi Gordon tackled the Big Issues of working for something better than cash In the course of my work experience I’ve chased senior citizens for photos, accidentally convinced foreigners I’m a member of the BNP, berated Julian Clary about his dead dog and phoned up the NHS to find out if the guy on the swine flu posters actually has swine flu. (He’s just an actor, that’s the line and their sticking to it.) Like a lot of my fellow students I’ve been working for free, in my case with the Big Issue. The Big Issue is a commercial magazine but it’s sold by homeless and vulnerable people who keep the profit. It aims to offer a leg up and eventually out poverty and homelessness. All this makes working for free considerably easier to swallow. While there have been moments of melt under the desk embarrassment, and moments of ‘why has no one filed for the last five years’ the truth is that my time at the Big Issue has taught me a lot about the job I so blissfully day-dreamed about for most of my time at college. It hasn’t put me off; in many ways I feel more desperately attached to those visions, of me, my notebook and pen squeezing the world, in all its enormity and wonder, into black and white type-face, like prize sausages in a butcher’s window. It has however made me realise how many cups of coffee, bizarre phone enquiries and surprising surly stand-ups stand between me and those visions. As graduation lurks round the corner I’m also uncomfortably aware that working for free will never cover the rent. That said, it’s still a dream, and for now one worth chasing grannies down the street for. Mairi Gordon Jen Bowden had an unrewarding work experience at her local newspaper During the summer break between first and second year of university I did a week’s work experience at a local newspaper. I had done another week at a different newspaper the week before so I thought I knew what to expect from this one. It was a bit of travel from where I lived so I ended up spending over forty pounds on travel for the week by taking three busses to get there. The experience itself wasn’t horrific, simply detrimental to my ambitions to learn all I could about the newspaper business before leaving university. I entered the office with tonnes of ideas and an open mind as to the tasks I would be given. I wasn’t naive, I expected to be sitting behind someone else’s desk and typing up press releases but I was determined at the same time to make the most out of the week. When out on one assignment with one of the reporters, she expressed great surprise when I took down a video camera tripod, and even greater surprise when I told her I’d covered aspects of journalism in A Level Media Studies. Yet none of this led to my being given any tasks other than snippets of writing. I sat in on one meeting the whole week and was promised that I’d be given a multitude of tasks for the rest of the week. Instead I spent most hours sitting doing nothing, or sketching ideas that I could write for ‘Student’ and listening to the chief reporter, a recent graduate, talk about his Facebook account, and at one point how he was going to make a sticker for his car. I was under the impression that when students offer themselves for work experience, they’re expecting to get just that. Most of the time their willingness to work is abused or ignored because they don’t yet have their qualification. They are the workers of the future, and if employers expect students to have experience, then it would probably be a good idea not to waste their time when they’ve held up their studies to undertake it. Jen Bowden Sara d'Arcy went to The TImes and was stumped with the all-important question; What the hell to wear? With only a week until my internship at The Times, I was stumped with the all-important question of 'what the hell am I going to wear?' Now this may seem like a superfluous question, but as a northern, liberal female entering an institution renowned for being conservative, in terms of principles and politics, it became a highly significant factor. My image would make or break my internship experience. I wanted to ensure that I would fit into the Times archetype, while still maintaining my identity, and thus become a face among their many interns that they would remember. This meant that I had to inject attire into my wardrobe that was in keeping with my indie credentials whilst also being conservative, sophisticated, and well covered up! It was a task that took up time and money; thankfully abusing my mother's credit card. Entering the ominous Times head office, slightly hung-over from a supposedly 'quiet' evening on red wine, I felt that I had managed to accomplish the un-accomplishable. I strolled into the London headquarters sporting a vintage patterned dress with a fitted black blazer, equipped in my Fred Perry flats. I felt that I dressed the part, mixing youthful fashion with office conformist. However, on meeting my colleagues I realised that my uneasiness was all for nothing; the Times office was relaxed, with a surprisingly liberal atmosphere and a certain lack of suits. After spending a week at The Times with like-minded writers, I learnt that my preconception of journalists as being orthodox, Conservative men was highly distorted. The face of journalism is rapidly changing from the negative image it held in, say, the 1980's. However, student journalists still feel the need to look the part, and regardless of transformations within the office environment, work experience results in unwarranted expense not only to subsist, but also to look good while doing it. Sara d'Arcy Rosie Nolan got creative then clumsy with a fortnight's internship at The Skinny Magazine I was fairly certain I wasn’t cool enough to work at The Skinny. The first morning of my two-week stint, I dithered pathetically outside the main door of the warren-like Drill Hall in a Leith by-street, desperate not to be so irritatingly early that I would interrupt some edgy, hyper-artistic journalistic brainstorming, and then panicked at the thought that they wouldn’t take kindly to a tardy intern. I needn’t have worried. The staff in the office were uniformly welcoming, albeit a little at a loss about what to do with me for the first few hours. This initial phase of indecision was clearly worth it however, since – contrary to my happy expectation of an arm-long list of menial tasks – I was soon writing reviews, updating their website and helping organise Festival events. Meanwhile, my first waves of anxiety about translating my English-Lit-essay-pomp into sexily descriptive paragraphs of Skinny-speak, had dissipated essay-pomp into sexily descriptive paragraphs of Skinny-speak, had dissipated by the beginning of week two. I was credible, I was hip, I BELONGED! And that was when I started embarrassing myself. I woefully misjudged the acceptability of a packed lunch (even worse, the smell of Thai sweet chilli was abhorrent to the much-revered writer sitting directly beside me); when trying to connect a USB cable, I whacked first my elbow, then my knee, then my head on the underside of a desk like a panicked spider and finally, when apologetically asked to organise the monthly mailout, I charged international postage on 20 of the copies being delivered to London. Safe to assume, then, as the intern who quite literally couldn’t address an envelope, my last day of work experience would be the last I’d see of the Drill Hall. But apparently iffy food odours, clumsiness and general ineptitude can be overlooked as long as you seem eager, since I was offered a permanent – if still unpaid – job. My verdict? Work experience is what you make of it: if you do your best to stand out – in a good way – and don’t expect miracles, you can come away with something more valuable than money. Rosie Nolan Andy Chadwick developed a few vices of his own on his three-month London internship Vice Magazine: purveyor of such modern journalistic opuses as ‘The Vice Guide to Milking Your Prostate', and my personal favourite, ‘Who’s number one at holding number two?’ Sounds like a good place for a budding student journalist to cut their teeth and hone their craft, right? Perhaps not, but my three months at Vice serving as whipping boy at the pleasure of a group of East London hipsters wasn’t as bad as the 21st century nightmare it sounds like it should have been. It helped that I wasn’t a rich West London kid ‘slumming it out East, working for Vice because it was the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to my parents despite living off their handouts, and it also helped that I did everything I was told. I wasn’t a great fan of a lot of their content, but much of it, especially the travel writing, was interesting, original and really nothing like the titles listed above. But looking back, and even though I obtained some good experiences, I still mainly think, ‘What the fuck was I doing?’ I went down to London with about £200, hoping I’d find some part-time paid work to fit around the full-time unpaid work I was doing during the week. I was lucky enough to have friends scattered around East London hose couches I could stay on, but after running out of money, I was reduced to eating unsold food thrown out at the end of the day by the nearby Eat and shoplifting when food there was lacking. I probably thought I was the fucking Artful Dodger. In the end I got a few shifts temping behind a bar in between running errands all around the city, interviewing random people on the street and searching the darkest recesses of the internet for weird stories that might warrant an article. I’m not sure how I thought I would manage working for three months unpaid, and it remains one of the most stupid and reckless things I’ve ever done; I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who can’t safely afford it. I never thought the prospect of a line on my CV and a good reference would drive me to act so irrationally. Despite this, I gained a lot of confidence from having survived the whole thing, and certainly learnt a lot about the media industry - it’s full of twats, but also some nice, interesting, funny people, just like everywhere else really. Andy Chadwick
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