3.

a program on a student radio station

Welcome to Student Life. It's spring and many of you may be thinking about ranging work for the long
vacation. So on today's program, Roger Anwell reports on a survey we conducted into the pleasures and
problems of vacation jobs. Roger.

Thank you Sarah. Well, the first thing to say is that by far the majority of students we surveyed did just
3 types of jobs. All of these obviously had their advantages and disadvantages. Starting with stock taking
in supermarkets. The thing that students said they enjoyed most about this job was the travelling. They
were often required to go to branches to do their stock takes and this was regarded as an interesting
plus. The main negative however was that they tended to find the job tiring with long hours spent on
their feet and climbing high shelves. Now one thing we did ask the students in our survey was whether
they had any recommendations for other people taking on their job. And they said perhaps not
surprisingly get good shoes. That's the only way you can keep going. Another job which lots of students
did was office work. And the positive feature of this actually rather surprised me until I remembered
what a hot summer it was last year. Lots of students named air conditioning as the best thing about
office work. The downside which many talked about was wearing formal clothes. Obviously this didn't go
down too well with students. The advice most people gave was to select a large office. That way you
have more variety of social contacts. Otherwise the work can get very boring. The third job which had
attracted large numbers of students was as a theme park attendant. And again I got a surprise here
because the big plus people talked about was good pay. It must have improved since my day I must say.
Anyway the downside I did recognise having to deal with difficult customers especially in the heat when
tempers get frayed. Not easy. And people said that it was a good idea to live nearby. Because there's a
lot of shift work and you don't have to worry about transport at difficult time to the day.

So those were the findings from the survey on the most common student jobs. But not all student jobs
have to be mundane and boring. One of the students who responded in our survey spoke at length
about his amazing job as a zoo attendant. Peter Marshall had read about work opportunities on the zoo
website and just went along with a friend to talk to someone in personnel. He was offered a job there
and then as easy as that. In previous years he had done singularly unexciting shop work so he was very
pleased to be doing such original work. He ended up working for just under three months which was
actually slightly more than he had anticipated. A meant that he had to miss part of university term time
but he said it was well worth it because he thinks he's found his future career path as a result of this
experience. He loved working on the educational side. In particular helping young kids understand about
the animals in their natural environment. He said it was the most intriguing thing he'd ever done. He
tells us though that with final exams coming up he won't be able to do any paid work this coming
vacation. So why don't you apply? If you are interested in getting further information about the findings
of the survey.