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Just a quick update to say I’m still OK. Yesterday I finally handed in my Final Report for my project – nearly 80 pages in all. I’ve also completed all my Spanish exams – I had the listening test last week, the reading/writing one this Monday, and the oral test today. The listening and reading/writing tests went much better than I thought they would. It now seems as if they deliberately made the practise papers really difficult, to encourage everyone to work harder. The theory seems to be that if you can cope with the practise papers, you will find the real exams a breeze. I’m not so sure about how I did in the oral test though – I hate presentations of any kind, and I felt a bit nervous. I think it was OK though.

Over the next 3 or 4 weeks I still have my final computing science exams to complete. My last exam is on May the 26th, then I’m free to do what I want for the summer.

Tomorrow will be our last official day of teaching before the study leave starts. It is going to seem really weird. But tomorrow at 4pm there is a special leaving party for all the people in the Computing Science department who are graduating this year, so I will go along to that.

On Saturday it’s my Mum and Terry’s wedding (I think I mentioned this in a previous entry). So over the last few days we have been making frantic arrangements, such as buying a new outfit. I have bought a nice cream trouser-suit to wear on the day. It took quite a while to find matching clothes and accessories – my top has peach flowers on it, so I had to find shoes and a handbag to match. I am really pleased with it though.

Not an awful lot of exciting stuff has happened recently – mainly revision for my exams which start on May 7th. This is the final week of the Easter holidays for me (yes, I know we have very long holidays) and then I’ll have 2 more weeks of lectures, then the exams, and then that’s it until they mark all the papers and the graduation ceremony in July! I can’t believe it will all be over, and it’s rather sad really. I will miss all the people I know, I’ll miss the routine and I’ll also miss writing for the student newspaper.

And then I’ll have to go through the terrible soul-destroying ordeal of finding a job – believe me, it’s not easy. According to what some of my relatives have said, it’s a lot harder to find a job nowadays than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Most of them went into work straight after leaving high school, without having any further education, yet they still found a job quite easily. Nowadays, even if you are a graduate with a degree there is no guarantee of finding a job quickly – judging by the number of posts on various online forums for graduate jobseekers and careers advice websites.

Large companies often have special graduate recruitment schemes, but they are extremely difficult to get into – I read that on average, 37 people apply for each available position, and only 17% of people who complete an application form get invited to an interview. People who pass the interview then have to do numerical reasoning tests and go to an assessment centre. After all that, only 2% of applicants are actually offered a position. This is because graduates from all over the country can apply, meaning you’re up against many thousands of applicants.

There are 2 large companies in my city which run such schemes, so I applied online to both of them. And guess what? I was rejected at the first stage (ie the application form stage) by both. Oh well, at least it meant I didn’t have to prepare for an interview or take any tests. At first I felt stupid for being rejected, but then when I read a careers advice booklet and saw the statistics for how competitive these schemes are, I didn’t feel so bad. Of course, I can still apply to these same companies again for direct-entry jobs, it just means I won’t be put on the graduate training scheme. It doesn’t really matter too much, because there are hundreds of much smaller companies seeking employees, and the application procedure for them won’t be so competitive.

At the moment my Mum is on holiday with her mother and her sister in Italy for a week. They go on holiday together most years. The holiday had been booked several months ago, it was just a coincidence that it was the same date as the Pope’s funeral. She’s phoned me up a few times, and it seems like she’s having a good time. She’ll be back home tomorrow evening.

Tomorrow morning I’m meeting up with my friend Naomi. We will probably end up going to the cinema and looking round some shops. I’m not sure what we will see – I’ve seen 2 films in the last 3 weeks already!