With a little help from... our alumni

On a 1-year MSc course, Hilary term is half-time - and high time to start thinking about the big "What next?" question. Who could be a better source of advice and inspiration than someone who has been in the same shoes before and can now look back on their post-MSc career journey with a few years of work experience in their back pocket?

For quite a few years now, SoGE alumni have been engaging in various ways to support our current students and, in February, over 90 of them from all over the world participated in our online MSc Careers Events.

The MSc students themselves helped shape the content by sharing their ideas and needs. The joint morning session on 28 January covered top tips for successful networking (provided by ECM alumna and career coach Clare Winter); an overview of the sustainability job market by two senior consultants from environmental recruitment agency Acre; and insights on how to make an application stand out from three HR professionals in different types and sizes of organisations. Rebecca Ehata from the University's Careers Service brought the morning session to a close with useful signposts to where to find more information, guidance and training at Oxford.

In the afternoon the event moved from Zoom to Airmeet, a platform extremely well-suited to helping people network online. In a virtual 'Social Lounge' alumni hosted tables where the students could gather to quiz them about their organisations, roles and trajectories. With four MSc courses networking in parallel (our WSPM students had their Airmeet a week later), we had a fantastic number of 80+ alumni on a SoGE mission that afternoon, and a great uptake from the students, too.

"The networking event on Airmeet […] was fantastic - a really neat way to speak to alumni across the world!" (Oliver Pooke, current SEE student)

"It was a pleasure to meet some of the current NSEG students. I found taking part to be very rewarding and I hope the students found it to be useful as well." (Hannah Stuart, NSEG alumna)

Our BA students also had the opportunity to meet some recent geography graduates (in person!) in a networking event on 14 February and learn about their first career steps, organisations they hadn't heard about and paths they hadn't thought about. What is it like to be self-employed? Which geography skills can you put to good use when you work in insurance? How do you best get into teaching? Is it worth doing a Masters? Short presentations and the opportunity to meet the alumni for a chat afterwards helped the undergraduates to have these and more questions answered by the end of the afternoon

Since last November, MSc alumni and students and have also been interacting as mentors and mentees on SoGE's MSc Mentoring Programme [PDF], which runs alongside the courses until the end of September. Alumni can also get involved by suggesting dissertation topics and by providing input into chosen dissertation projects.

A huge thanks to all our alumni who have been giving their time and advice in this meaningful way: who got up early and stayed up late; who carved an hour out of their busy working days and juggled childcare to log on to Airmeet; who listened and gave feedback, who helped brainstorm and opened up their own networks to make the SoGE Alumni Network the brilliant resource it is.