Express yourself!

Thanks to a friend, I came across this little gem today:

I think that makes for a brilliant little lesson there. I've been experiencing some trouble with self expression lately, be it on a very different subject: job applications. There are loads of great tips for cv and cover letter writing to be found online (check out The Guardian Careers, GoThinkBig, and BBC Careers), but in the end a lot of them come down to: be honest, express that you are passionate and motivated, and it'll be fine. 

Now that's exactly what's so difficult when applying, I can tell you. When I'm writing about any subject that interests me, I think I'm reasonably good at bringing my point across in a way that captivates people. However, when writing for a job application, with specific questions to answer, a way-too-low word limit, and my English that needs to be perfect, it's just not that easy. There are so many things you need to take into account and so many doubts keep popping up in your head, because there's quite a lot at stake. It's easy to let all that paralyse you. 

So I'll try a new strategy today: write as if I'm defending a super important point I've been trying to make for ages, and ignore word limit and style. Then edit afterwards. And worry less, most of all. In the end you can only do your best! (All sing with me: And the moooost you can eeeever doooo, is the beeest you caaaaan. Oohooh.) We'll see how it goes!

PS. If you need a bit of instant happiness: listen to the song I nicked the title from for this post! Doot-doot-do-do-doot!

After the rain

Eh. Did I say last time that I was gonna post more regularly? No? Good. Because I didn't. Yeah. Sorry.
I really need to set deadlines for myself, or start making lists, or something! I'll make that my late new year's resolution.

In my defense, it's been a really busy week. I took on a five-day temp job to earn some money. I will spare you the details (it involved a scanner and loads of invoices. Yeah.), but when I spend the whole day behind a computer, I just don't feel like turning mine on when I come home to write a blog post. (Also, with a job like that, there's really nowhere to get inspiration from, so maybe we should all be happy about that.)

Then in the weekend I went out, and my bag got stolen, yay. Then I went to the police station, they retrieved my wallet with most of my stuff but no debit/credit cards or keys, really yay. Then I had to go to the dentist. Very un-yay.

BUT there's good news too: I'm going to the UK on Monday! Yay yay yay! I managed to get myself a ticket to the BBC GetIn event in Cardiff, which is basically a big info session about the BBC Trainee Schemes and the Talent Pool. I'm very excited about that indeed! And since it seemed a bit stupid to travel all the way there (by BUS, because the Eurostar is damn expensive) to stay only one day, I'm spending the rest of the week in London. YAAAAAY! Compensates for the crappy weekend!

I'll try to do blog updates from London/Cardiff, but it's gonna be from my phone, so apologies in advance for crappy layouts and all that. If you want to follow my travelling adventures, in this case Instagram might be the best place. Find me here:  (or by the name of Mayasounds, of course).

In the meantime: still trying to finish my Work Experience application for the BBC too. It's so hard. Ugh.

Why UK?

You may wonder why exactly I've chosen to look specifically in the UK at the moment. The reasons are manifold, here are the principal ones:

1) The UK is awesome and I would love to live/work there for the rest of my life (at least I think so right now), so why waste more time in Belgium?

2) I love a change of environment every now and then. It makes me creative.

3) They do short work experience placements, which is exactly what I want right now. I haven't found anything similar in Belgium so far; it's all internships here, and they are usually long.

Can't learn as much if the placement is too short, I hear you say? Not entirely true. In my opera house internship, I learned loads in the first month, and hardly anything in the last three, because the tasks just started to repeat. That's why I'd prefer several short placements over one very long one - which only means I'm making things more difficult for myself, but hey, I'm still a woman right.

4) Any opportunity to improve my English is most welcome. I would especially like to pick up some kind of a stable accent at some point, instead of the current situation where I adapt my accent to whoever I'm talking to (which, oddly, causes Americans to think I'm Irish, Irish people in Ireland to think I'm American, Irish people abroad to think I'm Irish, and Polish people to think I'm taking the piss out of them).

5) Tea and scones. That is all.

What's next?

Happy New Year one and all! I took a bit of time off to relax after finishing my last internship, and obviously I was too lazy to even write a blog post in that time... Apologies! Here it is at last.

So what's next?
Nothing definite so far. I've been on the lookout for my next job for a while, but unfortunately I've had very little time, a lot to do, and Christmas in the way. To complicate matters a bit for myself, I've also decided to look for work in the UK this time, which means translating my CV to English and writing my cover letters in English, also pretty time consuming when you want things to be perfect.

I am mainly searching in the media business. Top of the list is - of course - the BBC. I've been keeping an eye on their opportunities for a while - they have a really interesting work experience programme, for which applications happen to open tomorrow. Of course I know I am aiming pretty high here - I estimate they receive about 8000 applications per position or thereabouts. But so be it - if you don't aim high, you can never hit high, right?

I'm also looking around for other opportunities, of course. I applied for work experience at NME magazine - something totally different, I am aware, but this whole year is about trying things, and I would really like to try both. As you have noticed, I like writing, but I also love television as a medium, and I hope I'll have a chance to explore both.

In any case, I am more and more convinced that my future lies somewhere in the media business. I especially love that balance between education and entertainment - a thing of beauty when kept well. It is important that people get informed correctly about things that go on in the world - but information goes down a lot easier when nicely packaged. I think the BBC is very good at keeping that balance most of the time. It's something I would love to be involved in. In a way, NME tries to do the same on a smaller scale, for a different public, and through a different medium. It would be interesting to be able to compare their methods.

Anyway, that's the dream scenario. Let's see how it goes! The search continues.

Easy does it

So, the decision had been made, I had come back home, and exams had just begun. The plan was to do a paid but irrelevant summer job (going on an Erasmus is not good for the funds, believe me) while looking out for relevant internships and placements starting from September. But first of all there were exams and a final paper to be completed. I was not on the lookout yet at all.

Plans about what to apply for were quite vague; I knew I would like to try something in media or journalism, and possibly also in a cultural sector. I knew I would love to find something abroad again, preferably in the UK or Ireland. My expectations, I think, were realistic: I expected the process of applying to be long and stressful, even more so because I'd never applied for a job before - except for some student jobs, but that can hardly be called applying at all. I believed it would be very hard to find a job in the fields I was aiming at, since they are notoriously popular and usually pretty saturated. And I predicted that I would probably not get paid for the kind of jobs that really interested me.

I was wrong on most points.

By mere chance, I stumbled upon an ad on my university website for an internship at La Monnaie Opera House in Brussels. The internship was at the Promotion & Communication department, it was unpaid (at least I was right about that part) and three-month-long starting from September. It seemed like a perfect opportunity, in short. I did not hesitate long and started working on an application (even though I still had a couple of exams to get through; the opera house would close over the summer holidays, and it was mid-June by this time).

Although I put quite some effort into it, looking back I would say I was not very well prepared - my CV, for one, was a little messy (no wonder, there was nothing very interesting to put on it except for the likely prospect of a BA degree), and my cover letter was written purely on intuition. (I can see that now, having just spent quite a while researching CV's and cover letters.)

But I just went ahead and applied anyway. I had a lot of excitement and little to lose; and apparently, sometimes that's enough.