Fresh outlook

So as it turns out, I did not get the World Traveller Internship. I wasn’t hugely surprised, and to be honest it was a huge weight-off knowing that I don’t have to think about it any more. I can finally put my hard work back into the mounting pile of essays I have to do for uni. The only thing that was a little bit of a disappointment was that STA didn’t ring us to tell us the results. We all simply got a generic email thanking us for entering the competition, and telling us that unfortunately we did not make it. I felt that after having spent three months working hard for the competition: making two videos, pressuring friends into voting, writing up a huge application form, and doing a phone interview, the polite thing would have been to call us to let us know the result. The main downfall of receiving the news by email was that we were unable to get any direct feedback. I emailed straight back asking for this, but apparently will have to wait for tomorrow to get it. There’s a lot of bitterness at the moment, and I think a lot of that will dissipate when we receive appropriate feedback and can finally forget about the whole thing, gain some kind of closure, and go back to our normal lives. It would be nice to know why we didn’t win and how we can improve in the future.

Apart from those minor qualms, I have quietly accepted the matter and gotten on with what I’ve been putting off for so long: planning the rest of my post-graduation life! I decided that I would like to travel around Asia for a year or so, but can’t stand the thought of staying in England for another year in an attempt to fund this. The STA competition really revived my thirst for travel, and now I am desperate to escape as soon as possible, so I started looking for work abroad.

A picture of Korea I found on google.

My first thoughts were on trying to find a job in Australia. I have a lot of friends out there, and I hear it is fairly easy to get jobs. When I researched into this, however, I realised that I wouldn’t be able to make a good enough wage to save up for a year of travelling. The jobs that would be available to me on a one year working visa just wouldn’t pay enough. So then I thought perhaps teaching somewhere in Asia might be a good plan. As I’m about to be an English graduate, I figure I’m pretty much qualified to teach English as a foreign language. It turned out I was right. Korea offer extremely well paid jobs to graduates, and they don’t require TEFL qualifications for anyone with a degree in English. They pay for your flights and give you a free apartment, and on top of that they pay you £1,100 a month, which is easily enough for me to start saving for a year in Asia. I’m half-way through the application form at the moment and hope to have it finished by the end of the week. If I get a job, I will have to start work in August, so that means I don’t have to hang around England for too long, being miserable that I didn’t get to travel for free with STA.

I also feel like I deserve a break before I begin another year of work, so I’m going to use some spare money I have to go to Sri Lanka for a month before August. I have a couple of friends that are interested in visiting Sri Lanka, so hopefully I’ll even have a few people to travel with, but if not I’ll just go alone.

My friend Rob holding someone's pet monkey on Unawatuna beach, Sri Lanka

I’m currently three chapters in to my second novel, and it is set in Sri Lanka. I have been struggling to write about Sri Lanka as my memories of it fade on an almost daily basis. It was only four years ago, but so much has happened since then, it is hard to remember the details specifically enough to write a novel about them. If I go out there for a month I can continue working on my novel, and then I will hopefully have it finished and ready to send to potential publishers by this time next year.

I also have a few vague plans for my travels around Asia: The STA competition got me really interested in short-film, and I think I would like to try my hand at making a couple of feminist socio-political documentaries. An inspiring friend of mine, doing a Media MA also told me that she is planning on making a film for Amnesty International about evictions in India, and asked me if I would like to help out. She’s not 100% sure on all the details yet, but it sounds like an amazing project that I would love to be a part of. I’ve also been speaking to one of the US top ten World Traveller Intern applicants, Annie Leroux, over facebook. She seems like a really interesting girl, and said she is perhaps planning on backpacking through Asia so I would love to meet up with her at some point and chat WTI, journalism, and future plans, but we shall see what happens. Check out her blog here if you have the time, it is full of engaging and thoughtful content on a range of different subjects, and is well worth a read.

So to summarise: although I am obviously disappointed at the result of the competition, I feel I have gained so much from it that in the end the result doesn’t really matter. I know I am going to travel anyway, I know I am going to blog and make films. But now I can do all this with confidence, knowing that I made it to the top ten of a very difficult and public competition. And no one can take that away from me.

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