It’s July, and my son, Kamran, has been home for the holidays for two months, since completing his second-year university finals in May.
He is desperate to find a summer job, to cover his day-to-day expenses, and just to have some money to go out with his friends and to put towards his mounting student debt, but despite applying for nearly 70 jobs in the last few months, he has not, until very recently, received a single interview, let alone a job offer.
Kamran is a medical student who left school with straight nines at GCSE and three As at A-level. He has passed incredibly rigorous medical school entrance exams and interviews; he has volunteered at hospitals and worked at GP surgeries in administrative roles, and yet, a holiday job in a shop or restaurant is proving exceptionally elusive.
Shorts
His experience this summer has pretty much mirrored that of last summer, as well as that of many of his peers, and we are starting to get the distinct impression that university students are bottom of the heap when it comes to the summer jobs market. Just one example of this came at a group interview he was asked to attend last summer for a well-known upmarket supermarket chain, where the first question asked by the interviewer was whether applicants would need to leave in September.
