My day in London

A half past six train to London King’s Cross didn’t entirely fill me with joy. I found myself sat at the platform with all the businessmen and women dressed in their fancy suits and their clean shoes.

 I must admit that I did feel slightly out of place as I stuffed my face with a croissant and managed to get the flaky pastry on my shirt. How people stared. Anyway, the train eventually arrived and I was off. After sleeping for the two hour journey, and successfully managing not to drool in public, I arrived at London King’s Cross and hopped onto a tube to Warren Street.

Why was I going to Warren Street? Because I had been chosen to attend Starcom MediaVest’s ‘Insight into media day’! I had applied via GoThinkBig (you know, that awesome website to help give young people work experience? No? Well get on it and get applying) and had booked my train ticket as soon as they had sent the confirmation email. Truthfully I didn’t know what to expect. I had no idea what a media agency was and I had no idea what it would be like. I was clueless. Anyway, the morning was spent with very important people in the agency giving us talks about what their jobs entailed. It’s safe to say that I never knew such jobs existed! Does anyone know what a geo-fence is? I now do…although it is far too long to explain it. Safe to say, the talks were very interesting. Listening to how these people use their creativeness to come up with ideas to help their clients with their campaigns was very inspiring. They were all so passionate about their jobs.

My name badge for the day which found its home on my notebook. I didn’t want to ride the tube with it on, did I?

But the top tip of the day came from co-CEO Steve Parker who said that when job hunting it was better to be yourself and not to worry if you didn’t have a plan. That was something which made me think for the past day. I don’t have a plan after university. I know what I want to do, but achieving it does seem impossible. I had gone to the media day with optimism that there could be another career path out there for me. Maybe media and PR would be interesting? Maybe it would be what I want to do? It could be. It was interesting. I cannot deny that. We split into groups for the afternoon and had to come up with inventive ideas to bring students to the cinema, and that was fun. I liked being creative around that. I enjoyed thinking of new ideas. But is it for me? I don’t know.

I’m still overjoyed that I attended the day. It did give me that insight I truly needed so that I didn’t go around blindly applying for grad schemes without knowing what I was talking about. Anyone who is thinking about heading into media should definitely apply for any opportunities they see. It could convince you about what you want to do in the long run! But for me, I left the session with thousands of thoughts in my head and headed back on the long train journey home.

Back to York!