All posts filed under: university

My First Days of Unemployment

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I am unemployed. It still hasn’t really sunk in. I left my job more than a month ago, but almost straight afterwards I went to Australia and New Zealand. I spent the next five and a half weeks relaxing on the beach, drinking cheap wine and orange juice all day and visiting islands, volcano’s and Hobbits. It was fantastic and it has inspired me to travel as much as possible for as long as possible as soon as possible. Yet it didn’t really prepare me for the reality of being properly and utterly unemployed. I’ve worked pretty much continuously for the last three years. When I was at university I started out doing short term work, like exam invigilating (where you get paid to wander around a room quietly for three hours) and event work (by which I mean working 11 hours or more behind a number of bars at a race course/festival purely so you can then apply for permanent bar work with your new found ‘experience’). In my third year of uni I worked at …

How Not to University: First Impressions

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Originally posted on Pinkjumpers' Blog:
Having survived my first semester at university, albeit somewhat haphazardly, I like to think that I  have already learned a great number of things with regards to surviving the ‘outside world’. In what I hope will become something of a ‘how-to’ series, I will share my snippets of advice  alongside my first-hand woes that naturally stem from a girl who has yet to master the art of living smoothly. A lot can rest in first impressions- it is the difference between being ‘that intelligent female  who knows a lot about 17th century literature’ and being ‘that girl who parades around with yesterday’s lasagne stuck to her face’. And never are first impressions quite so important than when you start university; when every impression is both first and nightmarishly   immortal. It’s not breaking news to reveal that a drunken slobbery kiss the night before is a terribly awkward encounter in Tesco’s the day after. But even those ‘did I really lick his face last night?’ encounters do not compare to the events…