Graduate + Week — 8th-12th March

To document this busy week, I’ll be updating this post every day with notes from the calls I attend throughout the week.

Monday 8th — University of Manchester — Women and COVID-19

As part of this week of learning, I decided to attend an extra event (not allocated as part of BCU’s Graduate + Week) which was centred around the disproportionate gendered impacts of COVID-19 against women.

This talk was so incredibly factual and informative and I thoroughly enjoyed it! The main focus was on the global south, and how many garment staff, who are predominantly women, have been placed in worse working conditions than prior to the pandemic. For example, lower pay, more demand with online shopping from the West and little to no social distancing within their working conditions, further violating female health and safety.

The majority of this call was for Masters students, so was relatively intense and informative on areas I don’t fully understand, however, the areas I understoof were so, so interesting. Not to mention that it is International Women’s day; I’m so glad I’m put some time today into informing myself further on intersectional feminism and how my experiences of COVID differ to other women across the world.

Tuesday 9th — Perfecting your LinkedIn Profile

The first talk I attended as part of Graduate+ was how to make your LinkedIn profile professional and employable. I chose to attend this call as I have a LinkedIn profile but haven’t exactly used it much in recent months at all. This call helped explain why making some of those changes and getting in a better habit with logging in was necessary. Some of they key tips we were given included:

• Putting your job title in the same title as your name — it gives employers an idea straight away what you do, which saves their time and your time.
• Have a picture that reflects yourself — Keeping it professional of course, you can make your photo reflect you. If you’re. a fun person, show it!
• When it comes to it, speak of your dissertation as a project, not a dissertation.
• If you choose to DM someone, only DM them conversationally on something you would say to them face to face, such as, ‘I really enjoyed your seminar today’.

Tuesday 9th — How to get a job during a pandemic

I personally found this call to be a little vague; of course, interesting subjects and advice was shared, but the majority of what was covered just seemed to be about job finding generally, nothing that specific about the challenges of finding employment in our current circumstances. Nonetheless, some of the interesting tips they shared included:

• Be proactive, show endurance, bounce back, stand out from the crowd.
• Reach out to individuals.
• Continue to network — attend events and webinars, keep reaching out.
• Adapt your CV for each job you’re applying for.

Wednesday 10th — How to get a graduate job

This talk ended up being relatively similar to the previous talk I had attended the day before, but was far better - it was specific to BCU and the Careers+ department. This way, I was given really vital tips about how to utilise the Career+ team next year, how they operate once you leave university and some of their key tips, such as:

• The key places to start looking for jobs that offer something for everyone: smile, NHS, Council.
• Try to break into the hidden jobs market where you can, there’s more hidden jobs than advertised jobs.
• Continue to network — ‘it’s who you know’ really is true.

Wednesday 10th — Smashing Procrastination

This talk was both informative and so, so fun. It was almost not worth making that many notes as Andy, the host, was explaining how procrastination works and how it is mostly about breaking habits. This talk so far has been my absolute favourite; he made the talk so engaging and so genuinely enjoyable to listen to.

As well as this, he broke between both the camera and his presentation which was a lovely change from a lot of the other presentations where they were constantly talking from the screen. Instead, Andy was having more of a chat with us.

Thursday 11th — Women’s Aid

This particular talk was covering a really important subject of domestic abuse and was bizarrely a nice change from the more industry orientated talks despite covering a really horrible subject. This talk was opening the floor to volunteering opportunities should any of us want them.

As this talk was less about graduate tips, I didn’t have tonnes of notes to make other than how to access the volunteering should I choose to do it. If I’m able to, I would love to do some volunteering.