Job hunt tip #142: SMILE!
Thirteen days into my new life in Melbourne and I am really starting to feel it. Not exactly the coolness, culture and creativity that I had envisioned but instead the strains of the job hunt. Working gives a sense of achievement. Even when you hate it and are counting down the minutes until the weekend – at least on the weekend you revel in the time you’ve got to relax. I am hunting within the typified work hours and am making progress but I still haven’t got much to show for my work which doesn’t send the spirits soaring. Yet I know that the fashion that I am going about it may take time. All I have heard is that it is contacts that will get you a job, so I have been working on developing my contacts extensively since I’ve been here. This has lead to some interesting leads and I feel I am gaining a lot of useful knowledge. But…. at the same time I also feel that I’m entering into relationships – regardless of how fleeting or twitterised they may be – with an agenda.
I want a job, and I will put on any friendly facade to get one.
The funny thing though is that none of my new contacts have provided any fruit yet I still feel much better for branching out. Something that I constantly seem to forget is that when you move to another place where you hardly know anyone, you hardly know anyone. Though there are plenty of people around it takes a while to melt the outer layers and really get to know them. So the more people that I meet the more roots I feel I am planting in this place. While not showing it’s worth in a professional sense yet, it certainly has on a social level, and that is something that shouldn’t be overlooked with the job hunt.
Hmm, in what continent should I work???
work or play?
Last Semester I got pretty bodacious grades. I worked really hard and I achieved, but in doing so I didn’t meet as many new people from around International House (the college where I live) as I have in past semesters. It didn’t help that I was living in a part of the college commenly reffered to as the ’Townies retirement home’, where third years and med students go.
When ever I felt like having a chat to someone I’d just open up a new window on the computer where I was sitting in my room and have a squiz on facebook to see if anyone had left me a message, or I’d check my emails (at least twice a day). Now this sort of social interaction does have it’s advantages such as being able to chat with people a long way away, but it still leaves you with a bit of a nothing feeling, like drinking air.
So this semester I’ve decided to go out into the rest of the college and just walk into peoples units and actively meet new people, and so far I’ve been doing this a fair bit, and I must say, I’m loving it. I’ve met lots of really cool people from all over the place and have been doing a lot of fun things – watching movies, playing table tennis, shopping, going for jogs etc. The thing is though I’ve been having so much fun that so far, Uni work has been knocked off the perch of priorities and I’m not focussing on it as much as I formerly was. So I guess it’s back to juggling work and play and just trying to find the right balance. Hmm, perhaps i should go and discuss this with my friends…
