OMG totes amaze babes: the power of persistence

**As an aspiring journalist, I am well aware of the fierce competition that I will face when l begin job hunting in a few months. As a result, the pressure is on to make myself as employable as possible. One way to do this is to get work experience.**

Accordingly, this is how I have been spending my past few holidays: interning at the Mail, the Independent, the Times and the Coventry Telegraph. However, as an avid Cosmopolitan and Glamour reader, I was desperate to gain an insight into life at a magazine, and sent off numerous cover letters and CV over the summer to pretty much every glossy on the shelf.

I didn’t hear back from anywhere so decided to be persistent and sent follow-up emails to each publication enquiring about my application. This strategy was successful, as Fabulous Magazine (the Sun on Sunday’s supplement) got back to me and offered me a one week placement over Christmas.

On the first day of my placement, I arrived at the impressive nine-floor high News International building in Wapping and was greeted by a friendly editorial assistant who lead me into the office, characterised by pink ‘Fabulous’ signs. 30 young women sat gossiping about Harry Styles whilst typing away at their Apple Macs – I liked it there already.

During the first part of the placement I assisted the Lifestyle team with research and interview transcriptions, which were mainly with previously overweight women who had ‘transformed their lives’ by dropping at least four dress size… not exactly A List celebrities, but at least the team were grateful for my help.

I also pitched article ideas to the Lifestyle Editor and learnt a lot about how the current team of writers broke into journalism and climbed the career ladder. Contrary to popular belief, almost no one had a journalism post-graduate qualification or shorthand experience, and many people had started out freelancing after not being able to afford to do unpaid internships.

As much as I enjoyed carrying out research and transcribing interviews, I was desperate to get a byline and was thrilled when my chance arose on Thursday. The Lifestyle team didn’t have any jobs for me to do, so I introduced myself to the online team and offered to help out.

This was a great move on my behalf, because the online team were under pressure to update the website regularly, so they gave me writing jobs to do. I soon realised that rather than trying to sound professional, I needed to adapt to a new style of writing characterised by phrases such as ‘amazeballs’ and ‘OMG’. Whilst I found this cringe worthy at first, I soon embraced my new repertoire of ‘totes amaze’ phrases and was praised for the personality expressed in my writing!

By the end of the week, I had acquired four bylines, free make-up and an invitation to return for the summer and be paid for my writing, which I was chuffed to bits with.

Okay, the placement hadn’t gone 100 percent smoothly – I had spilt my hot chocolate all over my shiny computer and desk, had stated that James Arthur had won ‘X Factor 2013’ and spelt Alesha Dixon’s name wrong – but overall, these things hadn’t mattered enough to ruin my good impression.

For other aspiring journos looking for work experience, the best advice I would give is to be persistent and not give up after not hearing back from a publication – just send a polite follow-up email.