This week keeps getting better and better

Alright, so this week has been another one of those weeks in which the days stretch like elastic. The week itself is so brief that you barely have time to make a cup of tea. To business!

There was a committee meeting at PIR towers on Monday, and the website is a-okay. There will hopefully be a new blog up there soon, telling of the exciting trip to Europe that other (significantly less impoverished) members took very recently. It'll be good to have some different voices up there, and with it ready to go we can start inviting writers from the general student populace to get involved. Pretty soon we'll have enough for our own journal. I've also started work on the final bit of the re-brand: a new banner. I'm gathering ideas for designs - it's going to be enormous, and may feature some faces. Now that's immortality.

Employability Week News: it's chugging along gloriously well. Speakers are coming forward, and I even got an email from someone today who's keen to "synergise" and "utilise economies of scale" and quite possibly "vertically integrate," though that last one sounds vaguely sexual so let's hope it's not that.

Over to Thirty Rock. What do we think of that presentation?




Aaaaaand back to me.

It's a mere 10 days away, and what makes it even better is that I'm out of office for a day next week. If I currently have an addiction to caffeine and my phone, then I don't think there's a word for the way I'll be during that conference.

Just to demonstrate my reliance on my black mirror: today I gave a presentation on body language, one that I'd never done before, entirely in French. My phone also switched itself off and wouldn't switch itself back on.

Take one guess which of these had me sweating like an ice cube on a blowtorch?

Speaking of which: that presentation was definitely one of the worst I've ever done, by virtue of a drastic misapprehension of the assignment. I understood I'd be talking for 45 minutes, and had it well spaced out and timed. I was actually going to be talking for 10 minutes. Have you ever seen someone accidentally change down to second gear going at 120 miles per hour?

That was what happened to my brain. The engine leapt out of the bonnet.

Still, we live and learn. Sometimes we live and learn by watching other people doing a much better job, which brings me to the presentation I watched. It was delivered by Eloise Leeson, who's a force of nature, and is on the subject of Public Speaking. I'd highly recommend looking over it, if you want to improve your Public Speaking - you'll find it at the end of this post and at this link if you're especially impatient.

I also had a fantastically productive meeting with the point-person for Global Jam - I'm doing my best not to be a micro-managing hoverfly but I can't help myself, especially when I know that because I'm relatively well-known (my narcissism is endless, matched only by my self-loathing) I can help smooth things over.

I've also taken part in an Interview Skills workshop, which was very useful, and now feel slightly more prepared for the interviews coming up. Oh hey, I've got an entire day of assessments in a fortnight. Smashing. I have time to prepare for that.

In opposite land.

Speaking of interviews - I had a fantastic phone call with an entrepreneurial hero. There might possibly maybe be a slim chance of a job in the quaintest, most glorious part of Englandshire there is - Gloucester.

Such England. Much pretty.

By contrast, Anna got an interview with Edelman and had it today. She kicked its ass all the way to Employment City, population (hopefully) us. We'll see how it goes, but it looks like the next month or two are going to be incredibly expensive, especially with the trips back and forth, graduation (with costs like forty-five British pounds to hold a plastic facsimile of one's degree) and moving to wherever we find employment.

Please let there be an employment-coloured light at the end of this tunnel.

That's been my week - teaching, logo design, and marketing-flavoured stuff are all light weekend projects.

Yup. Light weekend projects.

Up next: public speaking!