What are you doing at the moment?
I work as a freelance proofreader and editor, mostly for academics and universities. This involves things like editing journal articles for publication, improving the written component of funding applications, as well as helping universities market their courses through websites and adverts. It’s incredibly varied work, occasionally very interesting, with lots of freedom around your routine.
On the other hand, around 60% of the job is finding and keeping clients so you need to be comfortable with a level of insecurity and being quite cringey in marketing your services.
In other exciting news, I’m about to stop this work to begin a PhD at the Institute of European Urban Studies.
How did you get there? (What steps did you take / what positions did have after your master‘s until your current occupation?)
I began freelancing in 2021 as soon as I moved to Germany. Mostly out of necessity: I was technically a qualified City Planner but unless your German is C1, there’s basically no chance of working in that field. So I began learning a skill that people were willing to pay for and presenting myself in a manner that they would trust enough to pay someone with comparatively little experience. Anyone can do the same, technically. However, it’s incredibly difficult to build a regular, dependable income and there have been times (sometimes many months) where I haven’t been able to pull it off. As a result, I’ve had all types of odd jobs since moving to Germany: Barista (mostly good), paid internships (okay but badly paid) and warehouse assistant (terrible).
What current projects do you feel most passionate about?
My PhD. I can’t wait to begin. It’s in the field of housing studies, looking at Airbnb in Romania and Poland and its impact on people’s ability to access affordable housing. I’ll be conducting ethnographic research with real-estate entrepreneurs as well as studying housing entrepreneurship as an online phenomenon.
Why did you choose to do your master (Urbanistik / EUS) in Weimar?
Before moving to Germany, I studied a very practical, job-focussed course in City Planning in the UK. I learnt a lot but absolutely hated it. I came out of it very cynical about working in that field, where there was no room for positive ambition and it seemed like a large part of the job (in the UK at least) involved helping rich people extend their gardens or working with councils in the selling-off of public assets/preventing the building of affordable housing. I missed the critical, politically engaged perspective. I was pretty sure that I wanted to do a PhD and the masters in EUS seemed perfect with its theoretical, comparative approach.
What have you learned during your studies that has benefited you now in your working life the most?
The whole GRP experience was pretty special. The freedom to find a topic that you are passionate about, design a workable research project in a random place and actually be a researcher was challenging, exciting and overwhelming at the same time. Despite loads of things going wrong, it taught me how to organise a project from start to finish; contacting participants, conducting interviews and then bringing all of that together to form something half-readable was really beneficial.
Do you have any further tips and remarks for current (international) students joining the job market?
There’s no getting around the fact that it’s getting harder to find graduate jobs, and after getting rejected for 100’s of jobs in the past I’m probably not the person to ask. But here’s a few: Don’t use AI to write your full application, it automatically goes to spam 90% of the time. By all means, use it to scan for keywords/key skills and try not to lie too much. Basic (and probably cringey) but true: Be kind to yourself and try not to take rejection as a personal character flaw or a reflection of your worth as a person.
Which advice would you give your younger student-self if you could?
Pay attention in German class? That would have helped a lot.