You’ve missed the deadline (and the pay gap) to go on a J1. The €1,000 to go work in a kitchen somewhere in Montauk and sleep in a room with four other Irish people for an entire summer just didn’t seem as appealing (and affordable) as it did last year. And besides, there’s loads going on this summer at home, you don’t mind moving back for four months, you’ll get in touch with all of your old school friends. You’ll go to the gym. You’ll read all those books you’ve wanted too. Working down at the local will be great, your days are your own.
Now flashforward to summer 2017. You’re counting down the weeks until term starts as you hopelessly try and stay off Snapchat and Instagram as your friends send you occasional messages from some glorious beach on the other side of the world. You have somehow spent all of your wages on food, clothes and going out. There is but a short and glorious window of summer left till we go back to the grind of college, essays and exams. So unless you have some sort of elaborate scheme to swindle your way onto that family holiday your mother had been planning, or hope to get lost at Electric Picnic and pack three months of partying into three days, here are some helpful activities to let you get ahead of the competition for the upcoming academic year and make the summer that little bit more productive.
Coding
Not just for those people who got 625 points in the Leaving Certificate or chose a course that banished them to the secluded depths of the Hamilton, coding is now a necessary second language for a rapidly changing jobs market. Having the ability to understand and use CSS, Java and Python will serve you better than that C1 in higher French you’ve been tagging onto the end of your CV since moving to Dublin. You don’t even have to teach yourself – there are tonnes of free online training courses that can teach you the most basic levels of programming and coding. I’m not saying you’ll become Mark Zuckerberg, but being able to understand the basics of coding might prove useful in 10-years time.
Get Creative
There’s nothing funnier than sitting in a lecture and trawling through Facebook to find pictures of your friends, using your little cutting tool and pasting them onto a four-month old meme, then sending it to them and looking at them across the lecture hall until they open their phone. However, having the skills and knowledge to use Adobe properly is something employers are now looking for. Being able to create, digitise and design using Abobe is a hot skill that can get you in the door at a lot of companies, or help you spruce up your CV so that it doesn’t resemble every other Microsoft Office template. The Creative Cloud package retails at around €19.99 a month, so it’s not too expensive. Online courses are in abundance and there are thousands of cheap “follow at your own pace” online tutorials on how to create layouts, edit photographs and create digital landscapes. So instead of starting a new series while you depressingly trawl through your friends’ Instagram posts from California, you can turn into a graphic design wizard for when they get back.
Volunteer
During term time, charity and volunteer organizations such as Trinity VDP and Suas help run everything from soup runs for the homeless to after-school clubs for kids. Yet there are plenty of similar activities you can help with during the summer, even with charities like the Simon Community and Focus Ireland. More important than just a sentence on a CV, you’ll also be able to make a positive contribution to the world outside Trinity.
Broadcast From Your Bedroom
Have you ever sat on the bus or the train, listening to two or three young people in a “studio” somewhere talk about life lessons or their daily routine, or, worse, heard a knock-down version of Serial? Have you thought “hey I could for sure do that”? Podcasting is a growing art form that thousands of Irish people enjoy everyday. Now I’m not saying you’ll be a megastar, but grabbing some pals, downloading free editing software like Audacity, and spitballing about your favorite Netflix series or Love Island over your laptop mic for an hour could be a useful way to create some meaningful content that will show employers that you are both driven and creative. Podcasts can be uploaded for free onto the likes of SoundCloud and while you might only convince your mother and your one friend who is also stuck at home for the summer to listen to it, it’s another little creative box to tick on that CV for next year.
The first and last words you will hear every time you set foot into the Careers Advisory Service. Sure, you did set up a LinkedIn profile when you first started college, and opened up another tab after spending seven minutes filling in your primary school, secondary school and your transition-year mini company in a desperate attempt to space it out, and got distracted and never returned to it. LinkedIn is a valuable and often daunting resource, but using it to its full potential is sometimes the best way to get a corner on a future job. Having an updated and fully realised LinkedIn will show employers that you are there and ready to learn, as well as offering you the opportunity to message and scope out alumni of Trinity that could have a job for you. It’s 10 times easier to update a LinkedIn profile every time you polish off another “jobskill” than desperately looking through the documents on your laptop for that CV you made back in second year of college and attempt to sandwich in another society you joined in Freshers’ Week.
