The summer holidays at Cambridge are long. It’s the perfect time to get a job and earn back some of the money you spent in May Week. Even if the appeal of a healthy bank account does not lure you in, surely just having something to fill your days is enticing – especially in September once everyone else goes back to uni.

“It’s a real struggle to find summer work this year”

So – you write up a CV, print out copies, and set off to face the world with a handful of paper and a heart full of hope. Having handed your CV in to several shops, pubs, and other local vendors, you return home victorious, having been told ‘we’ll be in touch soon! ’ by friendly staff.

Silence. For days. You go back to a few of the shops, asking the awkward question ‘have you read my CV yet? ’ and that’s when you find out that they’re not actually hiring, and took your CV for no reason whatsoever. Your heart sinks with rejection, only getting heavier with each shop you walk out of with the same answer of ‘yeah, sorry, our team is really full at the moment’.

Consulting with friends from my area and those from Cambridge who live all over the country has proved that this challenge is unanimous. Is the job hunt really a fruitless search? Some friends attempt to comfort me, saying that you just have to be resilient, and try 50 shops just to get one job. Others provide sobering tales of looking for work in a café but ending up in a factory. Then of course there’s the lucky few that are the only teenager in the countryside village and can therefore ‘get a job in five minutes’, or so my sources say.

“What if the next one you try is the one?”

Either way, it’s a real struggle to find summer work this year. Even applying for online tutoring or something else remote is proving difficult and time consuming, and let’s not even begin to talk about internships, or worse, real jobs.

Part of me wonders whether the lack of availability for shift work is because, as Cambridge students, our term ends much later than other universities, so many jobs have already been snatched up by the time we move out. Maybe it’s simply that the youth of today are more motivated than ever before. Maybe it’s AI.

Or maybe, the jobs are there, just not as easily accessible as we had thought. Nothing worth having is! What if the motivational friend is right, that only through resilience, perseverance and overcoming the fear of rejection can we succeed? What if the next one you try is the one?

So, if you’ve given up on the search, hoping that your Vinted account will be enough to make you a millionaire from the comfort of your sofa, I hope that this article may have convinced you to pick yourself up, put on some motivational music, and set out towards the horizon, with the promise of eventual employment.