Careers and Higher Education Talks

The Careers Department organises talks by external speakers, designed to help student explore different career pathways. We were lucky to welcome five speakers during the past few weeks:

Katie Gamston from Cardiff Metropolitan University joined us to talk about degrees and careers in Sport. Katie, who is a Student Recruitment Officer, talked about the wide range of sport-related careers – not only in sports science and coaching, but also in fields such as sports media and journalism, product design and management. We also heard about the professional experience that students gain as part of their degree, working with top level sports teams and national broadcasters.

We welcomed Christopher Hutton to speak about careers in Law. Christopher is a Managing Partner at Hogan Lovells, and specialises in competition law. He explained the different routes into a legal career, either through taking a Law degree or by graduate study after a different degree. He also gave an insight into some of the legal issues that he works on, as well as giving students some excellent advice on wider reading and other ways of learning more about law.

Kinga Jurkiewicz gave a talk entitled ‘Why study the Humanities?’ She is a Recruitment and Admissions Assistant at New College of the Humanities, a university founded by the philosopher Anthony Grayling. Kinga started by talking about the importance of the humanities, the valuable transferable skills that they provide and the many career opportunities that they lead to. She then introduced NCH’s unique combined honours degrees, which allow students to follow a broad liberal arts curriculum rather than focusing exclusively on one subject.

Rebekah Shaxted talked to our Sixth Form students about apprenticeships. Rebekah is the Apprenticeship Support and Knowledge Project Co-ordinator at CXK, a charitable organisation providing career support, advice and guidance in the South East. She explained how apprenticeships work and the range of careers that can now be accessed through an apprenticeship. Most importantly, she gave us some fantastic advice on finding and applying for apprenticeships.

Finally, alumna Fleur Wilson (Yeomen 2003) joined us to discuss her career. After a Modern Languages and Linguistics degree, Fleur started her career with the Diplomatic Service Fast Stream. Over the last ten years she has held a number of posts with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and is currently Deputy British Ambassador at the British Embassy in Tripoli. Fleur will be talking about her own career journey, and more generally about careers in diplomacy.

Thank you to Katie, Christopher, Kinga, Rebekah and Fleur for giving up their time to inform and inspire our students.