The Cambridge Chat Thread

OP

At least you got a reply.

Reply 2022

Zhen Lin

12

I haven't received any email from the college or university about this flu buddy stuff. Hmmm.

Reply 2023

mwiko

Yeah.. being left off the mail merge would be quite insulting..

Wahey! I wasn't rejected in my flu friend proposal!

Reply 2024

Tom

Craghyrax

He's been applying to an average of 5 or 6 different jobs a day for the entire summer, with only 3 interviews, none of which were successful

How? That's, like, 250 jobs applied for! How does he even find that many positions open? How does he have time to write 5 tweaked CVs and fresh covering letters every day?

Or is he just sending a standard application to every single job he can find advertised? I have absolutely no claim to know more about job-hunting than him, but surely that's not the kind of approach that's gonna work :s-smilie:

Reply 2025

OP

Lol.

I wonder if they let you do it in threes. I'm sharing an entire staircase with only two boys in a shared set. That would be convenient, but on the other hand, we'd probably all get it if one of us did, necessitating outside intervention :shifty:

Reply 2026

OP

Tom

How? That's, like, 250 jobs applied for! How does he even find that many positions open? How does he have time to write 5 tweaked CVs and fresh covering letters every day?

The 'how' is basically by putting in the same sort of routine hours he did for his finals. He spends hours looking for suitable jobs and then customises his CV to each application, writes any cover letters from scratch, plus fills in all the specific stuff they often have on forms (like 1000 word essays on his views of a certain political debate and so on) So yeh. Its a massive amount of work!

Tom

Or is he just sending a standard application to every single job he can find advertised? I have absolutely no claim to know more about job-hunting than him, but surely that's not the kind of approach that's gonna work :s-smilie:

No, obviously not :p:

I think the difference is that you're looking for jobs you intend to take on in the long term. He only wants to work for a year, and he's busy applying for his Masters right now. The idea is simply to save up money to fund the Masters. So he has a preference for council jobs, or charity/NGO/think tank related work, but he's been going for any suitable admin-style positions he could see, including librarian jobs at loads of department libraries. (he's looking in Cam and his home town)

Reply 2027

Tom

Oh right. Well there's always low-wage temp-style work around...he just needs to go to an agency if he's just after something for the short term. Bit soul-destroying, but meh. I can't imagine NGOs etc are gonna pay well, if he's looking to save up.

/muses randomly.

Reply 2028

OP

Tom

Oh right. Well there's always low-wage temp-style work around...he just needs to go to an agency if he's just after something for the short term. Bit soul-destroying, but meh. I can't imagine NGOs etc are gonna pay well, if he's looking to save up.

/muses randomly.

Yeh but the job satisfaction would be much higher, and it would be fantastic for his CV considering his post-postgrad ambitions :p:

Also he doesn't actually *need* to save the extra money. He could fund his masters already, he just decided having some more would be useful. I suppose for the PhD and whatnot. Also it gives him time to do loads of subject related reading before starting postgrad, which appealed to him. So yeh. Range of reasons. And he will probably resort to temp stuff if he has to, yeh.

Reply 2029

harr

Y__

In Germany, most swine flu cases up to now went like this: People got headaches and other flu symptoms, they lasted for 2-5 days, then they were fine again.

2-5 days?

According to Wikipedia it takes a week to recover from a cold (not that the length a disease lasts is directly correlated with its severity, but it just seems odd to me).

Zhen Lin

I haven't received any email from the college or university about this flu buddy stuff. Hmmm.

Neither have I.

Reply 2030

OP

harr

2-5 days?

According to Wikipedia, it takes a week to recover from a cold.

Heh. Well 'swine flu' is probably a convenient cover for a few things :p:

Reply 2031

alex_hk90

19

harr

2-5 days?

According to Wikipedia, it takes a week to recover from a cold.

I'm guessing that's a full recovery from all symptoms - the headache/fever/other more serious flu symptoms shouldn't take that long to go.

Reply 2032

harr

alex_hk90

I'm guessing that's a full recovery from all symptoms - the headache/fever/other more serious flu symptoms shouldn't take that long to go.

I was interpreting "fine again" as having recovered from all symptoms. I thought I'd got the hang of not reading things too literally on the internet...

Reply 2033

OP

Athena

Try getting glandular fever (or measles, or mumps) in term time - that knocked me about for months and meant being told by my doctor that I couldn't go back to uni for a month (I whittled him down to a fortnight).

I think I'd just degrade in those instances. Although that's only theoretical, as basically Uni is my occupation now. I wouldn't have any 'home' for me to conveniently temporarily move back to.

Reply 2034

fumblewomble

2

Grr TSR is annoying me :mad:

. First it wouldn't let me edit my signature, then it won't let me put multiple spoilers in my profile. I want to create a spoilered list of my most popular posts which I can then send people to on occasion but my plans have been cruely thwarted :frown:

I don't care enough to ask the mods for help but i thought i'd come and moan in here!!! :o:

Reply 2035

alex_hk90

19

fumblewomble

Grr TSR is annoying me :mad:

. First it wouldn't let me edit my signature, then it won't let me put multiple spoilers in my profile. I want to create a spoilered list of my most popular posts which I can then send people to on occasion but my plans have been cruely thwarted :frown:

I don't care enough to ask the mods for help but i thought i'd come and moan in here!!! :o:

You can have multiple "expand" boxes in your profile.

Reply 2036

fumblewomble

2

alex_hk90

You can have multiple "expand" boxes in your profile.

test

ahhh. will experiment... thank you

Edit: No TSR doesn't want my expand boxes either :hmmmm:

Maybe there's a word limit.

Reply 2037

OP

fumblewomble

test

ahhh. will experiment... thank you

Edit: No TSR doesn't want my expand boxes either :hmmmm:

Maybe there's a word limit.

There's a thousand character limit for signatures. Why don't you either paste the various answers into a Q&A googledoc or pdf or something and then post a link to that in your sig? Or post them in your personal profile, which certainly has space, and then link people to the profile in your sig.

Another point is that a supermod can manually override the character limit in your signature if they know that its for a good reason. For instance, in your case it would all be spoilered and all be text, so it wouldn't take up half the page or slow down loading it, and its for a very TSR-serving purpose which they'd be happy to support. Hence my AAM recommendation.

Reply 2038

fumblewomble

2

Craghyrax

There's a thousand word character limit for signatures. Why don't you either paste the various answers into a Q&A googledoc or pdf or something and then post a link to that in your sig? Or post them in your personal profile, which certainly has space, and then link people to the profile in your sig.

It's my personal profile I'm trying to write in. It's let me do one spoiler but won't let me do any more - it cuts me off half way through the text.

The signature I can't put anything in at all.

Reply 2039

visesh