Finding placement can be scary and tough, believe me, it took me months to secure a role.
As I’m doing BA (Hons) Sociology and Social Anthropology, we have a choice of doing a year of placement (meaning my degree would be 4 years) or just 3 years course.

For the sake of finding more work experiences that could help me finding the job in the field I wanted, I decided to do summer internship as I have enrolled for the 3 years programme without 40-week placement. I was lucky to join two industries during the summer of 2021 – museum studies & marketing.

• Assistant Researcher – Poole Museum

I volunteered at Poole Museum between November 2020 until January 2021 as their Museum Facilitator, hence able to make some connections and secured a role as Assistant Researcher for their Maritime collections and exhibitions. It is an unpaid internship, however I managed to gain a lot of experiences, including conducting site visit to National Maritime Museum in London and building my connections.

I would highly recommend volunteering as it does help tremendously for your CV. I found lots of volunteering options on SUBU website.

SUBU Website – Volunteering

• Digital Creative Marketing – Mind Hubs

I landed this role approaching the end of summer and it was a 6 week paid internship. The company focuses on mental health amongst ethnic minority communities in corporate world. I helped and learned about re-branding, SEO (search engine optimisation), keeping up with trends and record/edit videos for Instagram and TikTok.

Working in London – recording & directing videos

It was honestly something I really enjoyed and gave me the opportunity to visit London. I found the role on Workfinder website, which is highly recommended if you’d like to gain work experiences in a short period of time.

Workfinder website

Here are some other tips to secure a placement/summer internship – there are also winter internship for those wanting to work in legal firms and spring internship for first year students.

• Create a LinkedIn account

My LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is like social media but for professionals/job seekers. It’s your online CV and you can find a lot of reliable job opportunities on this platform. If you need guidance, you can go to MyCareerHub website and you can book for a one-to-one session.

• Use the Career Center services

These services are here for BU students for a reason. I found the team to be very helpful and they also have CV guidance on their MyCareerHub website. On the same site, you can also find lots of job opportunities being listed as well as advertising their great  job fairs!

MyCareerHub website

• Do research of the company you get interview offers from

You do need to prepare your research before your interview to show them that you are not just passionate with the role, but also to work with them. Also list out your related experiences, strengths and weaknesses for the interview as these are the common questions being asked by employers/hiring managers.

I hope you’d find this post to be helpful! If you have any further questions or would like to chat, you can message me on Unibuddy.

Take care!

– Ayra H.