Stay at Home
Forget adventurous backpacking, advantageous work experience and earning as much cash as possible. My last summer holiday was a monotonous period of boredom punctuated with far too much daytime television, the odd family outing to an agricultural fair or pub restaurant and hours spent digging in the garden. My village (or meagre cluster of houses) is nestled deep within a field-strewn landscape criss-crossed with tractor lanes which stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s not entirely beyond the reaches of civilisation - we do have a post office set up in someone’s front living room - but without any shops or bus connections the word ‘sleepy’ is an understatement. Idyllic? Yes. Ideal? No. Rule number one if you live in the middle of nowhere and want to keep busy: get a driving license. Although the roads are undoubtedly a far safer place without me on them, failing my driving test was a mistake of gargantuan proportions. On the plus side, I still rank amongst the immobile elite who never have to act as taxi whore and never have to forfeit a night of drinking to get everyone home safely, but the down side is literal imprisonment over the summer. Months of virtual entrapment with the family is not fun.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my family and enjoy spending time with them. It’s just that fleeting visits of a few days are more up my street than any prolonged exposure to the rules and regulations of our family home. Their way or no way. Dishes don’t get drip-dried, but washed and dried and put away within half an hour of eating. (Believe me, I tried the ‘did you know there are millions of germs on every inch of a tea towel’ line, but I was promptly taught how to properly disinfect the towel in boiling water.) Everything gets ironed, including underwear. Apparently it’s hygienic. If I’m still in bed at half past nine, I’m woken up to the sound of hammering on the door accompanied by various rebuffs at my laziness. Great. Worse, I have to watch Midsomer Murders instead of Friends because my mum thinks John Nettles looks like my dad. Believe you me, I counted down the days to September and freedom. After three months at home I was ready for the worst stresses that university could throw at me. Roll on those essay deadlines!

Further Your Career
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I found out that I had been placed at RI:SE for two weeks last summer and as I tentatively walked into that now very familiar studio and reported to reception I really had no idea what was coming next.
What did come next was the busiest two weeks of my life which soon turned into four and then six, and while I had to leave to come back here, I would happily have stayed unpaid for a lot longer. I was placed as a runner as everyone on work experience was (the cheapest way to run a studio). At first I felt a bit useless but my new found gay best friend (everyone was gay, it’s media apparently) reassured me on a fag break that the ‘runners are the most important bit of a well oiled machine’. This I discovered to be above and beyond true. We did everything that no one else did, such as buy props for the next day’s show, try and blag a lot of freebies under the image of ‘product placement’, wash Kate Lawler and Ian Lee’s clothing, make coffee for everyone, research bands for festival interviews, go on shoots to interview film and music stars. This was all in a week.
The next week (and for the following five) I was on the morning shift. This involved getting up at 3.30 am every morning, being picked up by a driver and working in the studio during the show. Admittedly the working day was over at two, but it was exhausting. As a studio runner my job was to make a lot of coffee, clear the studio of rubbish when the shot was clear, look after guests (such fabulously high profile celebrities as the Eubank family, various pop idol rejects and my joint personal favourites, Girls Aloud and Phixx) and then after the show continue with the aforementioned jobs.
This was a fantastic job to have and I did get quite a few freebies and about 400 quid out of it. The experience was invaluable, I learnt a huge amount, made very useful contacts, am no longer afraid to apply for things I previously thought I didn’t have a chance in and my CV got a bit of a makeover.

Work For The Money
Everything has got the better of you. You can’t travel, you can’t go out, and you can’t have a peaceful time at home. Why? Your bank balance looks suicidal, and neither your parents nor your bank manager can emphasise enough: you have to get a job; any job. Here is how to make the experience go horribly wrong:
You look to the local pub - especially in the summer line-up you’ll find that almost all family riverside pubs of the sort which I applied to are verging on desperate for extra staff. The starting wages of £5/hr sounded good too. Although I wasn’t naïve enough to assume that the wages would ever actually increase, I certainly wasn’t prepared to discover that they would decrease as time went by. Here are some words of advice: before you accept the job, wages n all, stress over and over again that you are a student, and therefore do not have to suffer all the regular taxation. It was also unfortunate that I signed up for work with a manager who was, only a couple of weeks down the order-line, discovered to be a fraudster re-filling the spirit bottles with cheaper substances - generally swindling the company of all the wealth that he could subtly (and at times unsubtly) contrive. I discovered in my first pay check that I was included in the swindling scheme - I had been classified as a minor who got the full brunt of taxes. All my first-time-at-job-showing-keeness-through-extra-hours and tips had turned bona fide and disappeared into someone else’s pocket. My first 30-or-so hours resulted in a meagre £62 - that works out at just over £2 an hour. Crap. Fortunately the replacements were the ‘nice but dim’ variety. Through many calls to Inland Revenue throughout that summer, I was able to ensure that, I was paid the right amount from then onwards. Unfortunately, the previous manager left notes saying that I was staying for the entire summer, and had somehow ‘mislaid’ all my detailed dates giving advance leave-of-absence. I fought long and hard for most of these dates to be recognised once more - I certainly had no intention of working there all summer (the temperature in the kitchen soured to a sweltering 32 degrees by July...). My only way of doing this was to agree to make up for all the hours of my intended absence. I had to work until the end of September. I had started in the first week of June, intending only 6-8 weeks to be taken up. I eventually earned just over £1000 - a fair sum - yet the maths still doesn’t add up. Four months and only 200 hours of work? I wish.

Voluntary Work Abroad
It’s one thing to be moved by the commercials seeking aid for the Third World and quite another to donate. But do you have the guts to go that extra mile and donate your very being for your whole summer? I returned last summer to the town in Bolivia where I spent my gap year and, to be quite honest, as I boarded that flight at Glasgow Airport in 2000, I was wondering what on earth I had been thinking when I signed up for it - a whole year away from home, having to work with a bunch of people I’d never met (and who I couldn’t understand), and all in a country which at the time was rated the poorest in South America. In short, the nerves jangled. Fast-forward three years to summer 2003 and I seized the first opportunity I had to return to a place that changed me, and many before and since, forever. And I speak on behalf of thousands of students who have taken up the challenge, some in countries that would consider Bolivia a land of milk and honey. ‘La Palmera’, the project I worked at, was a beacon of light in the poverty-ravaged town of Trinidad. Born twenty years ago through the efforts of a Colombian missionary and his Scots wife, it has since flourished largely through the support of child sponsors in the UK and the USA. It is now two years away from adding a full high school to its already-established primary school and it can count the Bolivian president’s wife as a guest, such is its renown for quality education. The envy of the town, 300 families annually apply for the thirty places available in its kindergarten.
Such is the school’s demographic that many of the children who come to La Palmera every day will do well to find a meal waiting on their return home, which makes the happiness and joy to be found in their families a humbling lesson. When you work in such a place for your summer, you will struggle to find time for the many invitations from families to share a meal that cost a half-a-week’s wages for the husband. You will always find people who are poor in ways you’d expected, yet rich in ways that we materialistic westerners cannot grasp.
A favourite local saying is ‘manana’, or ‘tomorrow’, which serves to emphasise the laid-back nature of such countries. At first you’ll rage that it takes an hour to take out money from the local bank, but on your return home, hammock in tow, you’ll wonder what the rush is all about here. Please note, you’ll get hurt too. You’ll feel genuine anger as you walk down streets like the one right beside the project. On the right-hand side, four enormous mansions belonging to crooked politicians (it’s a given in the Third World, I’m afraid) faced a left-hand side lined with tightly-packaged shanty houses. And you’ll despair as you realise that many in the Third World don’t know what it is to watch a clean, bribe-free game of soccer. Yet you’ll come home with a fresh, unexpected perspective on what is unfortunately the way of life for the majority of the world’s population. Before you get caught up in the careers rat-race, don’t miss the opportunity to gain experience of infinite value.

Take a Long Holiday
You would be forgiven, particularly at this time of year, for thinking that the summer is mainly an opportunity to work. Whether you’re slumming it in some menial job or furthering your career with an exciting internship, those months in between terms are a time for grafting. I, however, always thought that the summer was a time for holidays. Perhaps I have never been able to shake off the pattern of my school years, when the season of sun (depending on where you are obviously) was a time of fun. Alice Cooper didn’t sing ‘School’s out for summer’ for nothing after all.
It was with this, somewhat unique, mentality that I decided not to work last summer. At all. Well that’s all fine and well if you’re loaded with cash I hear you say. Well I am most certainly the opposite. What I am however, is careless with money and prone to running up debts (I mean credit cards are ace - you have no money but you can still buy stuff). Plus, as I had worked part time throughout university life (on top of all that, er, studying) I was going to have a ‘summer holiday’ in the literal sense of the term. Anyway, I’d learnt that working in a bar to finance a trip to Thailand the previous summer was somewhat pointless when I spent as quickly as I earnt. I went on that trip anyway and the following summer I decided to cut out the work bit, whipped out my visa and booked a flight to Spain.
A summer in Spain, Morocco, Italy and France ensued. I was spending money that wasn’t strictly mine while missing out on the opportune time to get some work experience. Irresponsible? Well maybe, but when I considered that I’ll be working for most of my adult life (hopefully), I didn’t feel terribly guilty. I had an excellent time - saw nice places, met strange people, ate good food and got a sun tan thrown into the bargain. True at the end of the summer I was more broke than ever with no new prospects, but at least I had a smile on my face.

Kids' Stuff
WHEN I EMERGED hung-over, penniless and unemployed after a typical St Andrews First Year I unthinkingly accepted a job working at Dropzone, a club designed to entertain kids during the school holidays. There was only one catch - I didn’t like children. As my first day loomed like a huge, sticky fingered child complete with a headless Barbie on the horizon of my subconscious I tried to reassure myself that all would be well. After all I was still technically a child myself, at least I’d have something in common with the little tykes.
On my first day I walked into the job designed to crunch up my soul, spit it out and use it as Playdoh with the words “I need the money” as my mantra. Within minutes my worst fears had been realised as I stood back and surveyed my fate. One child had yogurt in her hair and two twins were fighting over a half-chewed Quaver. I would definitely need the mantra.
As I watched the twin with scabby knees get the Quaver I realised that standing around wouldn’t meet the job requirements so I picked up the tools of my new trade (wet wipes, half-size badminton racket, soluble felt tips) and got stuck in. Cheesy as it might sound before long I couldn’t wait to get to work every morning, and looked forward to getting beaten at tennis by a six year old (how I hate Wimbledon), and even emerging looking like I’d swum the Channel after playing swimming pool tig with five small boys and a frog float.
I can’t explain exactly how the Summer From Hell morphed into one of the best summers I’ve ever had and neither can I present a list of transferable skills I picked up to equip me better for the world of work - and I really don’t care. Learning to how to make friends with a seven year old, construct a paper maiche pig or appreciate the musical talents of Gareth may not be CV worthy but I definitely feel the benefits. If I was American I might even call it a life affirming experience. This summer? Summer Camp USA.