Trekstock: charity and careers

So, it’s Week 9, Term 2 of my final year, and this week alone I’ve been rejected by the BBC and I haven’t heard back from two other positions I applied for.

After many hours answering situational tests (‘Would it be very effective or ineffective for you to hide in the toilets all day?’), I am considering paying £2000 for the privilege to teach ten hours a day, six days a week somewhere in remote China. Once I pass the application process, one phone interview, another form and another interview, that is.

What’s the problem? I’m an English student, heavily involved in x, y and z society, with four summers of irrelevant work experience, and I’m apparently incapable of getting even poorly-paid placements with bad working hours.

Maybe it’s because my attention span is too short to sit through hours of personality tests; business students are better prepared – they know from their first days as bleary-eyed freshers that soon they will have to plough through contradictory questions intent on tripping them up and making them admit that they have no clue what they’re doing. Arts students? Not so much.

From what I’ve gathered, we’re expecting long slogs through unpaid internships that help us carve our own niche in the media market. And while it might be a bit excessive to ask for job interviews that involve correctly referencing in MLA or expressing your faults through interpretive dance, I think I’ve found the next best thing.

That ‘thing’ is Trekstock, a charity launched in March 2010 aiming to help beat cancer by funding research and providing information for young people, and with such names as Mark Ronson, Vivienne Westwood and James Corden offering their support, they’ve managed to be Oxfam’s cooler younger sibling, holding mountain-top gigs and collaborating with designers.

They’ve also raised the bar on internship applications. Rather than just accepting CVs, they have found an innovative way of weeding out unlikelies: having candidates compete in intense fundraising challenges and then allowing them the honour of applying. Bizarre? Maybe. As they’re willing to pay two lucky final year undergraduates £500 a week, a wage pretty mythical to arts graduates, it may just work.

A donation will give you the golden key to the whole process: the ‘trade up challenge’. Trekstock have hit on a unique method of recruitment; you can fundraise to win tickets, prizes, even jobs.

Inspired by the man who traded a paperclip for a house, keen finalists get a virtual Trekstock badge, donned by the likes of Beyoncé, and trade it for items of higher value with the aim of getting something so kick-ass amazing that it can then be sold on eBay to raise money for the charity. Jump through these hoops, and you get to fill in a form, then, if you’re lucky, be interviewed. Hurray…?

Cue frantic phone calls to see if parents can rope in any favours/buy something expensive to trade you, then potentially buy it back off eBay. While the project is an interesting one and certainly a worthwhile cause, it does make you wonder: do employers really think arts students have unlimited free time, or are they just testing us?

The challenge starts on March 5th and runs for three weeks. With an eleven thousand word essay due in Week 10 and a dissertation that just won’t quit, as well as Warwick students hesitating over lending a pen, let alone swapping one for a ‘virtual’ badge, I don’t rate my odds. And yet, with the aforementioned string of rejections and the salivating prospect of a job I might actually enjoy that pays (but also raises money for charity, win/win), how can I not give it a go?

When I inevitably fail and spend my hard-earned student loan buying something to trade to myself to buy from eBay in a desperate attempt to not look like a friendless loser, at least I will have tried. And I can say that the money goes to charity.