New Year, Same Old (From Swindon Advertiser)

New Year, Same Old

8:00pm Tuesday 12th January 2010 in

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Now before you start thinking this is going to be a cynical rant on modern life and I’m just another product of the MTV generation moaning that life is boring, it’s not.

I know how lucky I am to have a place to live, food to eat and technology my Grandad would never have dreamed of. I’m just referring to a new pile of letters and emails I have received, at the start of this year, polluted with the phrase ‘thank you for applying but I am afraid you have been unsuccessful’, much like the pile received throughout the end of last year. The need for the over dramatic, four syllable headline was just a journalistic way of hooking you in (and making me feel like I actually learnt how to do something over my three years at Uni).

I officially graduated from Bournemouth in November, but put down my last exam pencil in May, whereas I actually started applying for work in April. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect to walk straight into a job when I left full time education, despite having the sentence '90% of Bournemouth University graduates are in employment within 6 months' constantly rammed down my throat.

I knew times were hard and I knew I would struggle, especially with the media sector being as competitive and volatile as any other, but surely not that hard, people just weren’t looking deep enough.

Nine months ago I still saw life through rose tinted glasses and was waiting for the ideal job to knock on my door and invite me out to play. I remember the first rejection as if it was yesterday. ‘You were perfect for the job and a joy to interview. But we gave it to another candidate.’ Ouch. Teachers didn’t tell me it was this brutal. Or that once one place turned me down I had to get straight back on to applying for another one… without even a weekend off! I’d had several jobs before, but none quite as exhausting, demoralising and time consuming as being a full time job seeker.

Companies turned me down for being under qualified, over qualified, too skinny, too tall. Well, maybe not the last two, but sometimes it felt that way. I could do nothing right. My Dad would always tell me ‘we went to three working days in the 70s, you’ll be fine, we’ll get out of it soon’. But he always said stuff like that. He didn’t get how bad it was for me.

I managed to get some Christmas work, but it’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted my career. Nobody's life was as tough as mine.

Seven months in to my search, a friend of the family told me about their friend who was made redundant, just before Christmas. He had a wife and two children. This sparked off stories from others in the room about people they knew who had no idea when their next job was coming or how they would support their family. I looked around at the place I got to live in, the food I had to eat and the technology I got to use and thought about all the families struggling.

I still don’t know when my career will begin, but I’m lucky enough to have time to wait until I find the right company who wants me. My heart goes out to all those who don’t have that luxury.