Securing a graduate job is just ridiculous

Biz.Kid09 said:
Damn, reading this thread is starting to get me scared/nervous about even going to Uni!

I have just received and unconditional offer from Kent to study CompSci with Year in Industry.
I just can't help but look and read stories like yourself OP and it really putting me off :(.

Hope you get something sorted OP :)
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Don't worry about it. If you do well on your degree and year in industry you'll more than likely end up in a decent graduate job.
 
Cheers for the posts fellas. Feeling a lot better and more confident as daft as it sounds.

Fingers crossed I can get a good placement because as you fellas have said it can make a huge difference. Study abroad was very tempting with the promise of studying on the beaches of California sipping on cocktails! Fortunately my parents saw to that and I went year in industry :p
 
Biz.Kid09 said:
Cheers for the posts fellas. Feeling a lot better and more confident as daft as it sounds.

Fingers crossed I can get a good placement because as you fellas have said it can make a huge difference. Study abroad was very tempting with the promise of studying on the beaches of California sipping on cocktails! Fortunately my parents saw to that and I went year in industry :p
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You can always look for placements abroad. Plenty of people I know did their placements abroad and loved it! As long as you can speak something of the language of course :p.
 
SideWinder said:
:confused:

Geography isn't a micky mouse degree. Do you even realise what falls under the subject geography? It isn't all about studying capital cities of the world.
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This has been one of the largest problems I have faced when going for some roles. Many people just don't understand what a geography degree is.

"What can you do with geography?"

It's one of those weird subjects that everything can reasonably fall in to as by definition it's the study of the world. Where other degrees lead you done a very obvious path, geography tends to branch off in myriad directions.

When it comes to employment perception is unfortunately reality.

Calling it a Mickey Mouse degree is a bit far though? :confused:
 
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Maybe that's the problem w/ Geography. No real practical application. Most people spend 3 years studying it only to apply to jobs in other sectors.
 
WhyNow said:
Maybe that's the problem w/ Geography. No real practical application. Most people spend 3 years studying it only to apply to jobs in other sectors.
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You can say that about many other courses though. How many forensic scientists do you think actually land jobs in forensics?

How many fashion-degree folk do you think end up shifting to work as actuaries or in marketing?

To assume that people know what to do as a career so early in life is one of the greatest delusions of this culture. It's utter, utter madness. If your life hasn't been a methodological fixated application towards a single ambiguously defined niche job that didn't exist two years ago, employers just don't want to know.

Delusion.
 
Apologies if any of this post is a duplication, this is already a long thread, so I've just skimmed it.

The most important thing I can say to you if you're struggling with getting knocked back is to get feedback. Find out why, and address it. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with the feedback, it represents how you are perceived so that's the best information you can get your hands on right now.

Ensure you have a good CV.
Ensure you are familiar with the companies you apply to.
Ensure you have good examples of what you have done in your life to show your breadth. I know in your early posts you're a bit dismissive of the "times in your life" questions, but how else is an interviewer going to get a feel for what you are like away from your academic qualifications and work experience?

Bear in mind that salaries often reflect the area you start working in - when I got my first grad role I could have earned £10k more.....in London. A small but important detail there!

People do get these roles, and companies are still offering these roles, but it really is a competitive world so you have to do everything in your power to make yourself stand out.
 
WhyNow said:
Probably a lot more than Geographers go into theirs
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Very wish-washy of you. I can assert for a fact that there are far less jobs available in those fields than there are graduates.

Geographers traditionally go into teaching, town-planning, GIS, etc. and all manner of related jobs. So depending on where you draw the line, geographers are no worse off than any other traditional discipline.
 
semi-pro waster said:
Do you have any links to this revelation? As the UK is in the EU this would seem somewhat odd for it to be excluded if the criteria is that the workers must be from the EU. If it is as you say then it would almost certainly be open to legal challenge as it is prima facie preventing free movement of workers within the EU and so goes against Article 45 which is one of the fundamental tenets of European Community law
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He will be talking about this

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...s-1-000-cash-bribes-hire-foreign-workers.html

Which unsurprisingly the details are not actually quite like the headline (no, I hear you cry!)

The money is something a company can claim for the supposed extra training costs for employing a foreign worker, and is open to all eu countries, not just focussed to discriminate against British workers.
 
Freakbro said:
He will be talking about this

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...s-1-000-cash-bribes-hire-foreign-workers.html

Which unsurprisingly the details are not actually quite like the headline (no, I hear you cry!)

The money is something a company can claim for the supposed extra training costs for employing a foreign worker, and is open to all eu countries, not just focussed to discriminate against British workers.
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Ah thanks, so it's not actually discriminating against British workers - it's simply a scheme open to any EU citizen who wants to work in a foreign country (which would include British workers looking to work abroad) and gives them some assistance and the employer a contribution to the costs. I note that it has absolutely nothing to do with graduate jobs either except perhaps tangentially in that graduates are likely to have better language skills already.

I'll be sure to tone down my level of outrage again to the normal background level...
 
D.P. said:
Not really, most physicist and math grads work as software engineers etc.
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Not really true, at the top universities the majority (~70%) of mathematics grads end up either in finance or doing a post-grad (PhDs mostly) - I assume the figures are pretty similar for physicists. I doubt most end up in software engineering
 
I don't understand what the problem is with this stuff. I've been employed since I was 16 and through college to now (just finishing a gap year/intern-ship at 19). I've applied for four jobs two replied and got two interviews and two jobs. I just tell them why I'm actually good and they like it. I'm now going to UCL (best in the country for what I do) and I didn't bother applying through UCAS because my grades weren't high enough and every looser applies through UCAS. I rang them up and told them this is the course for me and why I'm suitable, with a bit of persuasion they gave me an interview which when I turned up to it the professor sat me down and asked me a few questions then told me I was in - unconditional in February . I must have been there for 15mins!

BTW I'm into electronics and my life has been electronics for the past 5 years and almost engineer at just 19 with no degree. Also sports at a high level is good - I'm junior GB team shooting.

My advice just make yourself different and don't use the roots all the other suckers use to try to get the places. If you then want to ask me why you haven't got anything different to tell them then that's why your not getting the jobs!
 
GSWAudio said:
...almost engineer at just 19 with no degree
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The practical side maybe, but engineering isn't about the practical side of electronics. Unless you've also been studying high level mathematics in the last five years (by high level mathematics I mean ODEs/PDEs, Taylor's/Maclaurin's Theorems, Fourier series, Gauss-Jordan, eigenvectors/values) - that's just a small sample of the mathematics involved in first year engineering. If you haven't done any of this yet you're nowhere near "almost engineer".
 
lukeharvest said:
Not really true, at the top universities the majority (~70%) of mathematics grads end up either in finance or doing a post-grad (PhDs mostly) - I assume the figures are pretty similar for physicists. I doubt most end up in software engineering
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I'd bet most of those end up spending most of their time at work coding or fixing spreadsheets regardless... There is relatively little work out there in finance for people to come up with new mathematical models... there is rather a lot of work out there for people to implement models which already exist. 'Quant' = glorified C++ programmer.
 
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