Wet Feet

Wet Feet offer an excellent careers guide for graduates and young professionals. It is fairly US-centric but it’s general advice cannot be far off the mark for the UK. Advice ranges from 6 Steps to a Job Search Action Plan to a odd discussion of Dating on the Job [?].

Wet Feet appear to sell this customised advice to various universities, inc. Oxford. From the sloppy URL encoding, it seems there are 157 sub-sites thus far [dpip<=159].

Jim Key

Some poetry by Jim Key from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe:

I went out with a model,
But I found her dull,
And also she was one of those fatty models;
So not much to look at.

___

Baby faced assassin.
Assassin shot baby.

The Fresh Ball 2006

The guys behind the entertaining May Day Bingo Ball announced today The Fresh Ball 2006, which is an ‘unofficial freshers ball for everyone‘.

The May Day Ball was certainly good fun and the old bingo hall on Magdalen/Cowley Road proved to be an unusual location with lots of original charm that was well-suited to a ball focused on a small number of acts.

Hopefully they will learn from experience and rethink the entertainment slightly: no matter how good/cheap acts are, if they are to engage the 99% of attendees that are in the main hall, then they need to encompass broader tastes. The fact that The Brothers’ 80s electro funk/rock act that night and OU’s salsa team were usurped by the Brookes DJ playing the Baywatch theme should indicate things going slightly awry.

UK GRAD Careers Advice

My mind has been turning again to The World of Work and I came across some excellent archives of online advice given by UK GRAD experts.

• Week 2: CVs and applications
• Week 2: Interviews and assessment centres

Dr Sara Shinton also provides four articles [Word docs] on CVs, Application Forms, Interviews and Assessment Centres.

In addition to these, UK GRAD provide a nice list of possible interview questions.

Elsewhere, UCL have a nice section on ‘key skills’, inc. a Key Skills Grid.

What can a Physicist bring?

David Potter in this month’s Physics World offers hope for us physicists [19 (8) p42] :

Back in the 19th century, studying classics was seen as good preparation for positions of leadership, but in the modern world I think physics is a wonderful training of the mind. It teaches you to apply rigour to modelling simple, even banal, problems like how an apple falls. That approach is extremely useful in business — in analysing and understanding how markets behave. Business gurus and consultants talk the fashion of the moment, which is often claptrap, so applying greater vigour is valuable. Theoretical physicists known well that out of every 10 ideas they have, nine are nonsense, even if they seem beautiful.

I hope to collect some more titbits like that over the next few weeks.