Summer pocket money vs relevant work experience.

As some of you will know, this summer I am working on check-in for a low cost airline at a London airport (My attempts to anonymise this blog later on will be some what futile, but at least I'm making the effort...).  

Originally I was supposed to be working in catering for the Met Police for the Olympics but after waiting for nearly 4 months for my security clearance to come through and with little communication from my employers-to-be I gave up on hearing from them.  I was also offered a volunteer position at the 2012 Olympics, it was a great position as I'd have been paired up with a national team and would've provided support to them by sorting out tickets and things, driving them around and if paired with a Spanish/French speaking team I'd have helped with the language too.  I'd have loved to have taken this position, I know it was a once in a lifetime opportunity but two things stopped me.  Firstly the training was whilst I was still in Granada so I'd have had to have made at least 2 trips back on weekends which would not only be expensive but really inconvenient and also I'd have had to spend money on petrol just to get myself to the tube station everyday.  Watching the Olympics now and seeing other people I know in volunteer positions makes me wish I'd taken the chance, but it would've just been unrealistic.

Before all this I had been looking at internships at translation agencies, I'd been accepted by two, one in Swansea and one in London.  The problem with internships is that whilst you are potentially gaining all sorts of experience in the area you're interested in very few of them will pay you, or even cover your expenses.  When I started to look at how much money I was going to have to spend in order to take up either of these positions I realised that once again, it was just unrealistic.   

And with that the job hunt began again.  As any student looking for summer work will know, finding someone to employ you when you're going to leave them again mid-September isn't the easiest thing in the world.  I applied for jobs left, right and centre and eventually got a phone call from an agency staffing the travel industry.  I went along for an interview and found myself on a waiting list for the last training course of the season in a couple of days time, luckily for me someone else dropped out and so the job was mine.    

A month into the job and I have been shouted and sworn at (although indirectly), called a jobs worth, practised lots of Spanish and a little French and met a lot of new people.  But that's an entirely different blog post!