Careers Fare

Now if you don’t know me then I should probably say that I am a student in my final year of university, which explains why I have enough time to write a blog. One thing that we students do have to do, other than destroy our livers and watch Jeremy Kyle is visit careers fares. I have to say I really hate those bloody things. Fair enough it is a good opportunity for companies to show what they have to offer in the way of jobs, and it’s also great for us students preparing to be spat, kicking and screaming into the real world to get a head start in the application process. However it always seems to me, to be one of the most worrying twenty minutes of the term; not only this, but with each passing term the worry factor increases tenfold. There are always scores of eager, clean cut, organized looking students (who wear wrist watches) crowding around equally clean cut, wrist watch wearing employers discussing in great depth, various career options. I think the reason for my fear is that, this is it. This is when all that time you spent listening to the right music, watching the right films and drinking the night before lectures in an effort to be cool finally catches up with you. From now on, it’s the geeky keeno’s in charge. My epiphany came when I stood in the middle of the careers hall with my buddies off my course. I was, trying to look a bit cool with my scruffy hair and tattered jeans waiting for the man who gives out really cool jobs to approach me, (he would be a fellow coolio) and say
“Hey man, you look pretty cool, want a job?”
To which I would reply,
“Yeah sure, do you want me to rock up from about noon till three in the afternoon and then pay me a few grand a week?”
If you haven’t been to a careers fare before, it turns out, actually this doesn’t happen. It’s the people who do the courses with all those hours of lectures and tutorials who the rest of laughed off as idiots who get the jobs.
“Hey Rich I got a free pen, what you get?”
“Hey Moist I got a job with a starting salary of 40 grand a year.”
It’s even worse if you have no idea what you actually want to do with your life. You approach a stool with a cool picture of a rocket ship or a huge car full of money and then find out that they either don’t employ Sociology graduates or the job they have to offer you is in human resources and the work involves sitting in an office telling people which part of the county they should be in over the phone. Either that or you can have a job going around telling other people what jobs they could be doing.
I left the fare, came home and watched home’s under the hammer. This would usually have been mind numbing escapism hour, but then one of the presenters said “Success only comes before work in the dictionary.” Ouch.