Active Searching or Online Laziness?

I’ve had a cup of tea (3 heaps of sugar). and now I’m at ease. My mind is ready to focus and write coherently and chronologically. Well that is until the sugar kicks in, I can imagine myself acting all Sheldon-esque when he has coffee for the first time in one episode in The Big Bang Theory. If you haven’t seen it you have to check it out… and if you have seen it before, same statement still applies to you.

So anyway, I thought to myself in the midst of third year that I should be getting around to trying to secure some sort of work placement for myself for when I finished university. Thinking back now, it sounds like I was very organised as this was during the first term of my third year that I began to makes moves toward trying to secure a place. Now I can tell you this, there are enough graduate or placement opportunities waiting for those who are prepared and know what they are looking for, I sadly was not one of those people.

I remember in my initial searches looking for PR graduate placements I would see schemes that needed lengthy applications, where time and effort were paramount in completing the application, and say to myself that I would do it later. BIG MISTAKE. One thing I would say to that past version of me is to only search for opportunities when you have the time to sit down and take the time to complete whatever application I stumbled across. Leaving them, as I did, leaves you vulnerable to forgetting about the application, not being able to find the same opportunity again or even leaving it too late that the deadline expires. Just saying that you will look for an opportunity does not qualify as an active search, rather it is so easy to feel like you’ve done something by just doing a quick google search.

What I am sure that I ended up doing most of the time was sending a quick cover letter which I did not even read through thoroughly, alongside my (at the time) very poor attempt at a CV to multiple agencies. And when I say multiple, I mean LOADS. What I see now was that it was obvious to these agencies that no effort was put into the applications, I am even sure at times due to my laziness in going through each application thoroughly I probably used wrong agency names at times. Failing to see these simple mistakes is something that I as an agency wouldn’t forgive, and would just send the email straight to the Trash folder. Which is where I am sure a lot of my emails ended up residing. What I’ve gathered now is that agencies like to see effort in some form of another, whether it is in your CV, (make it simple for them to see your main achievements) or your passion in your cover letter. There were times where I got responses, and due to my online laziness I did not follow-up well enough. I will at one point show you the quality of some of these quick applications I sent out to these PR agencies, as well as the vast number that I sent out. I’ll even see if I can find a time where I referred to the wrong agency name or made a mistake worth blushing about (if my skin would allow me to blush).

Regardless, it’s all part of a learning curve. And I have learnt some, yet the amount ahead for me to learn is too vast to comprehend, which is why this quest for a time where I can wear suits and drink scotch is so shrouded in mystery and despair. Yet I will and have kept trooping on.

Still loads more to catch you up on. Next time. My hands are getting jittery now. I think the sugar is hitting. I hope I can control myself and not go all hyper like Sheldon, I’d certainly get some weird looks at the least, or I’d just end up getting sectioned. There I go again, going off on one.