Now that I am coming towards the end of my summer of working in the Lancaster Environment Centre, I thought that I would write about my experiences leading up to and whilst working at the University. The reason for me searching out work experience over the summer was, although partly motivated by wanting to add to my CV (what student doesn’t when we’re terrified of the current job market!), also led by my worry that I might be bored over my 15 week summer holiday!
Initially I hadn’t considered contacting Lancaster University because I had assumed that I would be staying in London over the summer, during the break from studying a BA in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. I first emailed Paul McKenna in LEC around April and was so excited when I got a reply saying that there was probably going to be plenty of things that I could help out with, in particular the Catchment Change Network International Conference.
Over the first four months of the year during which I sent out about 60 or 70 letters, emails and applications to organisations around London I must have had about half a dozen replies. Some seemed promising; I went to Canary Wharf to meet someone from a small NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) and was told that he would be in contact with me in May but I never heard anything afterwards. A couple of other small NGOs replied but the placements weren’t quite what I was looking for and the larger organisations didn’t have anything. I also was invited to an interview at the London Citizens office in Whitechapel and was offered an internship with the East End Trades Guild, but I felt that the cost of staying in London over the summer (particularly in the East End because of the Olympics) outweighed the benefits of the internship.
Despite it being unproductive this year, I have learnt lots of lessons in applying for internships around London that will help me for when I hope to look again in the future. It seems that to be considered for an internship or work experience in London it is a prerequisite that you have a degree. I guess that it isn’t that a degree is necessary for the level of work involved, but more that the organisations, charities and governmental departments can afford to take the crème-de-la-crème, especially if they aren’t obliged to pay the intern.
After meeting with my tutor at Queen Mary I decided that the skills I might gain from working in LEC – personally and on my CV – would be an asset for almost any career that I might choose, whereas the skills from working with the East End Trades Guild would also be extremely useful, but not necessarily something I couldn’t learn from my degree anyway.
I arranged to meet Marion Walker a few days after I arrived home from London – I was quite anxious to make a good first impression and show what I was capable of, but also quite nervous about the people I’d been emailing, all with PhDs next to my first year in an undergraduate degree! But I was very much reassured when I arrived and everyone was so welcoming that I quickly forgot that I was by far the least qualified in the office!
I got straight into helping Marion organise the annual Catchment Change Network (CCN) International Conference, held in the Management School; I was putting together the welcome packs and keeping up to date with spread-sheets which counted up how many people were coming etc. This was probably the most challenging aspect of working in LEC because there wasn’t any room for errors – documents had to be updated and efficiently named so that old copies weren’t deleted in case they were needed later, or that data wasn’t lost in saving new files. Tidying up the folders after the conference so information could be found easily in the future was also a mammoth task, but much easier without the pressing deadline and constant emails from delegates!
It was also my responsibility to collect and display a selection of posters, produced by visiting delegates, and academics and masters students from LEC, which were presented during a break from the programme of short lectures; it seemed to be quite successful as a discussion point and definitely got academics, students and those from the industry sector talking about recent research in areas related to the conference.
Paul, Anna, Marion and the Get-Out!By the time the conference arrived we were pretty well organised so it ran fairly smoothly and it was really quite enjoyable. Listening to some of the talks was very interesting (if a little beyond me!) but I found the delegates surprisingly easy to talk to and, on the whole, not at all intimidating.
What I found most constructive in talking to them was listening to their experiences in the job market; ‘job security’ is not something to be taken for granted in the modern world of work, which is not what I expected in a highly-educated and skilled sector. Talking to more people employed within LEC helped me to understand more about how employment works within academia which I found was quite different to what I would expect in perhaps an independent organisation or industry; I definitely think this has been helpful in me thinking more about a career path for after I’ve graduated and partly as well what I might or might not study post-graduation.
After the Conference and the GLUE celebratory workshop that followed I was working on tying up all the loose ends from the past week (sorting expenses forms, creating final total numbers of delegates on each day etc.). Since then the work has shifted towards expanding CCN’s engagement with stakeholders, which has involved reviewing websites to see which features are more successful and looking into using social media as a tool to involve the public, as well as keeping those from industry and academia up-to-date. I’ve also begun helping with the administration of the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation’s PhD projects; processing project applications, sending out newsletters advertising PhDs two or three times a week and ‘manning’ the inbox to answer enquiries.
By Anna Sellars
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