So, since my last post, everything has changed. I don’t just mean that I’ve finished my dissertation, and am therefore free. I have, and am, but that isn’t it. No… I’ve managed to get a job, and a proper one too!
A little over a month ago, not long after I wrote my last blog post come to think of it, a friend sent me a link to PricewaterhouseCooper’s recruitment page. You see, he was concerned about what I was doing with my life, and saw that PwC were still recruiting for this September, and thought that I should at least consider it. Mired in the depths of academic depression, I thought that an attempt to get into the real world made a great deal of sense, so I filled in an application and sent it off.
I’d never really thought about a career in accountancy before, perhaps as my educational choices demonstrate, but it seemed to make sense. They train you in the dark arts of finance and business over three years, getting the hallowed ACA qualification at the end of three years hard toil, and then you’re unleashed on the world as a chartered accountant, armed with perhaps the best understandings of business available, apparently. As an avid Dragon’sDen watcher, and Apprentice addict, this sound business founding sounded great so an application actually sounded like a very good idea! And besides, my sister, brother-in-law and flatmate are all accountants, and they seemed to be doing pretty nicely for themselves…
Well, a matter of minutes after I’d sent in my form, I was pinged back an email asking my to dust off my reasoning abilities and take a maths and logic test. I took them. I then got another email me thanking me form my time, and that they’d be in touch soon. It was quite late by this stage, so I went to bed.
The next day I’d decided to get up early to ‘crack on’ with my dissertation, so the alarm went off at 5:00am. Fate, though, seemed not to want me to get cracking though. As my eyes struggled to focus on the overly bright laptop in the early morning gloom I saw I had another email: it was an invitation from PwC to attend an interview in a few days time!! Well, I accepted of course, arranged a time, and then went straight to the shop to buy the FT!
Well, long story short, after a long series of interviews, reasoning tests, individual and group exercises, and networking sessions, I now sit here in front of a conformation of my start date in the Bristol office of PwC! It really is a very odd feeling: to have a future, that is. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed being a student, but really the MSc was a step into student-dom too far. I’ve enjoyed it, but really I’d had enough of the whole student thing, and was beginning to get a bit depressed about job prospects to boot. I guess, as I said in my first post here, the reason I dived into an MSc was to avoid the recession, but it actually seems that taking it face on may have been a better strategy! It still doesn’t seem real that I’ll be walking out of the office, this time next week, after my first day, but there it is!
So, IU guess that this is probably my last post on here. If this blog is still active, I might pop up a couple of posts to keep you up to date with what life after uni is like. Nevertheless, all change please… How’s that for closure?