Hi Xangans!

      As you are no doubt aware, this weblog will no longer be updated. Instead everything is moving (or will be moved - eventually - ) over to my brand spanking new website at http://www.marisa.com.au . Time will tell if I eventually muck that one up as well. For now it is there and I am broadcasting whatever it is that I used to broadcast to the world INCLUDING the Perth Diary articles.

    Yes, you can still read the Perth Diary articles on the new website. However, since most of you read the articles via the email subscription option previously, I now have an option for you to subscribe via email to the feed on my website.

   Click here and enter your email address and you will subscribe automatically to the marisa.com.au RSS feed. It will be a seperate email in your inbox and it will not come with all the other xanga weblogs you subscribed to.

   So in short:

             Yes, I am still writing the Perth Diary articles.
              No, they will not be on this weblog anymore.
             Yes, you can still read them via email by clicking here, or via the new website.
             Yes, if you have feed readers I have other options for reading the RSS feed at the website.

    Hope to see some of you on the email list and the site soon,

        Cheers, Marisa.

       My resume, or C.V. as some like to term it, used to be four to five pages long. Most employers only give the first page a casual once over before moving onto the next application or so I am told. So now, my resume is two pages long and instead of paragraphs and indents, I have categories and points. I also now have dozens of different versions of cover letters all named something like "marisacoverletter.docx" or "coverlettermarisa.docx" so I can differentiate between the two without letting the prospective employers that I email them to know that I am applying for several different jobs at once.

     That is what I am doing right now. Applying for work. I have graduated and therefore that seems the next logical step - find a career. I am not concerned about a career - I am more concerned about whether I will have money to pay the rent and the bills. Any job will do.

     There are lots of ways to find a job. One way is to register for the DOLE - this means that the government gives you an allowance based on your needs for rent and so on as long as you search and apply for work. To ensure that you keep your side of the bargain, they register you with employment agencies and if you are lucky, you will get an agency that will attempt to find you work that you are interested and keen to do. Until you report back every week or fortnight to the department on how many jobs you applied for and when, you do not get any cash.

     Another method of finding work is to use a job board. Job boards are online websites that post job ads. In some cases, if you sign up and fill in an online resume with your details of experience and so on, employers can search for you as well as you search for positions. A well known international one is MonsterJobs. One that works in Australia and New Zealand is called Seek.com.au. Another two are MyCareer and CareerOne. These websites often let you apply online directly when you see an ad for a position you like - you just need to attach your resume and cover letter and send it. You can also set up automatic searches so that whenever new positions are posted, they get emailed through to your inbox if they meet your specifications. This means that Seek automatically emails a detailed list of all the new jobs available in the publishing field anywhere in Australia as soon as they are posted.

     Job boards such as Seek are usually what most people tend to turn to first. A lot of graduate handbooks and career advice will tell you though that most of the positions available are not often advertised publicly. People tend to either recommend people they know to fill a position or they promote someone within the organisation. So if you are not career minded, you might have to be to get promoted from proofreader to editorial assistant within the same organisation or company.

     You could still try the newspaper. Occasionally the newspapers will come out with supplements that detail positions within a certain field. If it is National Science Week for instance, then suddenly there might be a pullout with all the science related work available. Or perhaps it is the end of the financial year, so perhaps it is a major time for hiring within business fields and so on. Most national papers have a designated day such as Wednesday or Thursday during the week and Saturday on which the jobs are listed in the newspaper. Before Seek became popular, you could never buy a newspaper on Wednesday or Saturday morning unless you woke up at five. I remember walking down the streets of Northbridge just after midnight on Friday night and watching the guy on the corner run out of all the Saturday morning papers that had been dropped off only a few minutes before. People used to grab them to look for work. Maybe with the recession we will see a return to that - maybe the servers on Seek will be overloaded and crash instead.

     I suppose it helps when you have a degree that narrows your field a bit. My flatmate's degree in Molecular Biology leads to research scientist and analyst positions only but those sort of positions can be in any kind of field from conservation to mining to medicine. However, my flatmate only needs to type in "researcher" or "analyst" and bingo! Meanwhile, I scratch my head and go "What does one do with a B.A. (Hons) in Geography and English Literature" - I am not quite sure what that means in terms of a job description. I am not just a "scientist" and I am not just an "liberal arts graduate" - I am kind of a mix of both and I can't put both into a search engine and expect it to come up trumps.

     That's the point of an Arts degree - you can go into any field. This then however makes it hard for you to decide: a) what can I do and b) what, out of what I can do with this, do I actually want to do? I could go into management in any field. I could do secretarial work, in any field. I could go into research, academia, journalism. I could go into public relations, audio visual management, communications, conservation, history, government work. I could do another year of study and become a teacher. However, none of this makes it any easier to decide and so far career guidance has provided me with naught.

     Though I guess I have kind of decided - I decided on publishing. For the last two years I have subscribed - at a heinous student rate - to a little publication called of all things "The Weekly Book Newsletter". This is what is known as a trade journal. A trade journal is something akin to required reading for people in that trade. So if you were a banker on Wall Street you would read the Financial Times or be a bit sneakier and get Google to email you stock market updates. Here's a tip from me - the best stock to invest in if you can is the the stock of things people will always need. YKK manufactures zips and fashion is such a huge market, there is always a need for zips and buttons. 3M invented sellotape, removable tape, removable hooks and the Post-It Note - everyone everywhere uses these not just as office supplies but as branding. Quite often you will get Post-It Notes with messages on the top half handed out to you at concerts and festivals and conferences advertising some company or the other. These two are the cockroaches of the financial world - their species will survive fiscal holocausts like global recessions.

     Enough of that. The Weekly Book Newsletter not only lists all the news of what's happening in the Australian publishing industry but it also lists the jobs. Which is why, if you are like me, you consider the newsletter a worthy investment. Jobs advertised in here don't get advertised on Seek or any job board. The idea is that people within the book industry would know of the newsletter and therefore apply for the jobs therefore the advertisers can be assured of the people having had some experience within the book industry or at least being keen enough to find out about the newsletter in the first place. I only found out about it after emailing random people in the industry with my resume two years ago while looking for an internship. So, defining at least one field or industry you would like to work in and then reading the trade journal is worth it.

        Another method is to target the companies themselves. Hunting down the website of a company you want to work for - such as in my case - Penguin or Allen and Unwin for example - is worth it. Sometimes you can apply for jobs directly via their website. Sometimes they will direct you to another website such as Seek and most of them usually have a page listing what sort of vacancies they have at the moment. All websites will have contact information. This helps - who would you address your cover letter to otherwise? It helped to know that Allen & Unwin don't seem to have a Human Resources Manager listed on their website but they do have a C.E.O. Mr. Robert Gorman. At least, I knew who I was talking to when I wrote my application. I also knew where their office was and since they are a really nice company, they even listed their environmental policy online. That's the first publishing company I have seen do that. As a Geography and English Literature major, is it any wonder that I want to work for them?

       The same applies to government jobs. Go to the website for any government department at a local, state or federal (national) level and you can find a) a list of positions available b) a link to the government jobs board website c) instructions on how to apply d) cadetships, internships and graduate training programs and e) volunteer work. The cadetships, volunteer work, graduate training and internships all generally lead to fulltime work within the department. You can tailor your search so that you can apply only to the Department of Arts or the Department of Fisheries or perhaps even to just your local museum or city council office.
 
        I have managed over the course of the Christmas break to apply for around about 87 jobs. I think I lost count though. I have not heard back from any of them though the deadline for applying for some of them is in early February so it might take sometime for any replies to come in. Because that is the nature of employment. It takes time. That's why you don't get employed straight out of school, that's why you sometimes have to move interstate or overseas, that's why the government has the DOLE set in place to ensure you don't become homeless for defaulting on your rent while you're looking for work.

     So do I have a plan? I do. It involves saving money, buying stamps and mailing a lot of writing and job applications off, getting a part-time job and doing a lot of freelance editing and writing work if I can get it. What I like about my plan is that it is flexible - I have only one goal to meet - that of paying my bills. It also makes a lot of logical sense - not just my logic but other people's logic as well so hopefully it will save me from a lot of well intended nagging.

      Hopefully, it will also give me some time to whittle my resume down to one page that can knock someone's socks off.

 
  - Marisa Wikramanayake

 
         My family has an inside joke that I am absolutely horrible at the Sinhala language. This has no doubt got a lot to do with the fact that I always got bad grades in the subject at school. I studied in the Sinhala medium for awhile, so while I understood a lot, my horrible grasp of the language meant I could not communicate sufficiently during exams. Concepts would swirl around in my head and I could not find the right words to translate them fast enough. Reading text was easy - my interest in looking for patterns and logical analysis usually meant I had a good idea of what the question asked and I often knew the answer but I never knew how to say it.

        For awhile there my grades dropped. Hence the assumption that I was horrible at the language. However, I am someone who was born into a family who almost always spoke English. My first language was English. It wasn't till my sister came along that we started as a family speaking Sinhala more and by then I was three and a half years old. I had started speaking at the age of one and my basic communication patterns had been set, imprinted, dealt with. My sister, however, seemed to catch on and became more bilingually efficient.

       A few years later, I went to school where I was the only person whose first language was not Sinhala or Tamil. The teachers took a lot of pains to teach the basics of English grammar and vocabulary but in the other languages they did not feel a need to do so. The assumption was that the children knew as much they needed to know about these languages because they spoke them at home, at school, everywhere. So I floundered and for a long time understood words but had a very basic vocabulary that I could recall - most of it slang and therefore useless when I was called upon to write an essay in formal Sinhala.

      There was no way I could be expected to pass the Local Ordinary Level and Advanced Level examinations at a time when there was no option to take them in English other than switching schools and taking the London examinations instead. I switched schools and swapped mediums.

      Now years later, I have been away from home for eight years. I have lived in society that requires me to communicate in a variant of English. I have rarely had an opportunity to speak Sinhala. I have more opportunities to speak a language such as Japanese rather than I do French, Sinhala or Dutch.

       So I am amazed that when I do go home, that I can remember words. I can recall my grammar much better and more vocabulary now than I could when I was in school. It isn't absolutely perfect and it probably never will be. I have friends who know three to four languages and I envy them because I don't think you can adequately learn a language in a classroom, you need to be using it and you must have a need to do so before you become fluent. I look at my friends and think that they must be lucky, they must have had such opportunities or perhaps more determination or dedication than I ever had. I wonder if they ever realise how lucky they are.

       I do wish I had someone who speaks French, someone who speaks Dutch, someone who speaks Japanese and someone who speaks Sinhala more or less on a daily basis fluently. Even if I floundered at the start, I could then practice. I could improve and perhaps then I would no longer require my brain cells to work faster and hesitate before finding the right words to say.

       My desire to learn languages comes from a desire to communicate. Just as my interests are varied simply because I want to be able to strike up a conversation about anything with anyone, I would like to do so in other languages. It's not enough for me anymore to rely on context, logic, pattern recognition and an interest in etymology to read and interpret other languages, I want to dredge words up and use them. I want to be able to play around with them, the way I can with English.  My inner child finds this ability to play with words fun and so I want more toys to do it with.

        In the meantime, I am still the butt of the family's jokes. In English, of course.

  - Marisa Wikramanayake