Tips to reduce post- Christmas burnout on placement applications

This is a guest post from Royal Holloway business student, Rebecca Burton, who is undertaking her marketing placement year at Epoch Making Toys. In this article Rebecca offers students advice based on her own experience of applying for placements.

Rebecca writes: 

Finding a placement last year has got to be one of the most difficult processes I’ve had to undertake in my career so far. I most certainly underestimated how lengthy this process would be and how much effort I would be putting into each application.

Around this time last year, I had received my first proper rejection after what I thought was a successful Assessment Centre. I was feeling very disheartened and burnt out after 5 months of applications. I was starting to feel like the end goal in getting a placement was unobtainable. The January blues do not mix well with placement applications! Despite this feeling, I decided to keep pushing through, and low and behold, a few months later I received an offer to work at Sylvanian Families!

Here are some tips I wish someone had given me to help me through the burnout and lack of motivation post-Christmas:

1.     Take your time with applications

This part is easier said than done.

I remember when I first started applying, I wanted to get as many done as possible. I had heard the horrors of how long this process could take, and I just wanted to get it over and done with! Trust me, take your time with all your applications. It’s hard trying to find a balance between wanting to do loads of applications and completing uni assignments at the same time.

I would recommend making a specific time of the day dedicated to applying, doing psychometric testing, interview prep, etc. This will help you especially when the next stage is an automated psychometric testing and you’ll receive a time limit on when you must submit it by. Sometimes you can’t stick to this, but even just having the initial schedule in will help prevent you from burning out, because you will most likely experience it…I definitely did!

2.     Keep a bank of STAR examples on revision cards

Once I had gone through a fair few 1-way interviews, I soon realised all the questions seemed to be around the same skillset and experiences. When I was prepping for any type of interview, I would note down all the key skills they had listed on their job advert and link it to a specific project/experience.

 

Companies are looking for situations where you can specifically pinpoint what you did, how you went about it & what was the outcome. When a new interview came up, I brought out my stack of revision cards, which included various situations I had undergone, alongside the skills I had strengthened/acquired. It helped cut down the time on trying to think of a situation due to the time constraints. I could easily pick up the relevant card, quickly scan it and adapt it to the specific company before answering.

 

Through the various interviews, I became more confident in being able to answer due to the ongoing practice of previous interviews. This experience will help you in the future too when applying for grad schemes and entry-level roles.

 

3.     Don’t skip the weekly vacancy bulletin!!!

I found my placement through the vacancy bulletin from the placement team



, and I was so close to just skipping it!

It was around February time and I was very near to giving up my pursuit of finding a placement, but I had told myself to apply for a few more and see what came of it…and I’m glad I stuck through it!!

The bulletin has a variety of placements vacancies, majority of which you don’t see on other platforms as some companies like to target specific universities, like mine did. So definitely take a look at when MN-YIB send out their weekly bulletins…your future placement may just be waiting for you!

 

4.     Don’t compare your journey to your peers

I think this is the most important tip of all.

Everyone has different experiences when getting placements, some get them in November…others get them in July or not even at all. It isn’t a reflection of how hard you worked, because at the end of the day, we all end up with valuable experience seeing the inner workings of a job application process, which will help in the future when applying for grad or entry-level roles.

Don’t get disheartened if you see lots of people posting their offers on LinkedIn, just keep pushing through and an opportunity will hopefully open up! No one can truly prepare you for how hard this journey will be, but once you finally receive that offer letter, you know all the hard work was worth it!