The following blog post was submitted by 3rd year BSc Marketing student, Anna Bradford.
Let’s start off by saying that as an individual, I’m incredibly stubborn and fall into an incredibly dramatic slump when things don’t go the way I want. Take for instance when I didn’t get into the university of my choice after getting my A-Level results.. I think my family can vouch for me when I say I cried day and night and refused to come out of my room for about a week. But as they say, thing’s fall apart so new things can be put together, right?
It was around September of my 2nd year when I started to think about my placement year. I literally had no idea where I was going, what I was doing but I followed my friends behaviours to research online for internships. Many of my friends were going for the big placement schemes to start with but I decided at the beginning that I didn’t want to get stuck in a dead end job that I didn’t have a passion for. So then you start to look at your passions. My passions involved my blog, make-up, cosmetics, luxury goods. I could write for days on end about my new foundation or cleansing water which is something I felt extremely comfortable talking about.
My search started on Google. I remember being in my university room, staring at a blank google page and searching all the keywords under the sun. “Make-up internships”, “cosmetics internships”, “marketing schemes” – you’ll start to realise that when you start to look into these industries, such as fashion and beauty, you’re very much expected to be paid nothing, or if anything, a pittance, for a few weeks of experience in their offices.
My dream was to live and work in London so it took me quite a while to get to grips with the fact that I was going to have to live at home and commute, to work at many of the luxury fashion houses or niche cosmetics companies. December soon dawned on me and I suddenly realised that I was the last one in my group of friends without an internship. I started to be invited to seminars & lectures without my friends to discuss things like my CV and the ways I was approaching companies.
In January, I started to get a few emails back from smaller, but well known, companies in the industries I wanted for an interview. I’d get suited up and make my way to London to sit in their office and be asked questions. They all went really well… it was just the timing that was the issue. Many of the interviewers wanted somebody to start immediately rather than July and so that’s where my downfall was. Continue Reading →