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| Anthony Lingham - left 1997 | |
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What was happening in your life at the time you left Cedars? In order of increasing importance, I had got a place at university, I was working as a Saturday Assistant at Leighton Buzzard Library, and the Scully family had just moved into Ramsey Street. During your time at Cedars, did you have any idea what you wanted to do next? I had no idea at all what I eventually wanted to do in life. I wanted to go to university as all my friends' older brothers and sisters had and it sounded like fun. Since I wasn't doing badly with my A Levels, it just seemed the logical next step. What actually happened next? University is where you really become who you are. You're on your own for the first time, really, and it's where you decide how you are going to live your life. For some reason you go in one person and you come out another. Well, the same person but even more "you". What they teach you in lectures is about 1% of what you learn in those three or four years. The most important thing to me was the chance to mix with all sorts of different people. At the end of the first term, I had made a load of friends that I would never otherwise have met. Some were foreign students from places I hadn't even heard of, some were from strange parts of the UK. A few of them, it turned out, were from Leighton Buzzard. Some belonged to different cultures or religions that I didn't know much about at that time. Some had been to school at Eton or Harrow, and some were even Lord this or The Earl of that. Some of them had famous parents or were even famous themselves. Some were very rich and some were from very modest backgrounds. |
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But they were all just people. Normal people. On arriving in Oxford I was concerned that there would be these snobby public school types who would never speak to the likes of me - the sort of commoner who didn't know his Chateaubriand from his Chicken Zinger Tower Burger. But of course it was me who was the snob; making judgements about people without getting to know them, and based on only one piece of information. What was your first real job? While at university I used the skills I'd picked up in Cedars art lessons to make some money by doing some designing and branding work for companies' printed and web-based corporate materials. When I left university I got a job doing this full time for a media agency in London. After a while though I realised that I wasn't good enough to go anywhere in the field, and I wanted something more challenging, so I looked for somthing different. In my 2nd year a university, I had got involved in helping with the running of the Oxford University Careers Day, which was the world's 2nd largest careers fair. In my 3rd year, I and a few others were in charge of it. Through this I had made contact with loads of graduate recruitment people in the City and I used these contacts to find out what was out there. I hated the idea of sitting at the same desk every day doing the same job so I joined a management consultancy. We get called into companies for a few weeks or months at a time, helping them do things that they may not have done before, but which we have done many times with other clients. My specialist area is helping companies set up and run training courses. I get to travel to lots of different places and meet lots of people. What are you doing now? That's what I'm still doing. Still enjoying it and I have progressed up the ladder a little bit. I'm living near Brick Lane in East London, always being amazed by how many people from my year at Cedars live or work just a few minutes away. The local Tesco is our version of Friends Reunited! What's next for you? What would you like to do in the future? As ever, I have no plans for the future. I'm happy in my current job and would like to continue to do it until I don't enjoy it any more. What is the best piece of advice you were ever given? There are no shortcuts. You can't lose weight without reducing your cake intake and doing a load of excercise, and it's the same with everything in life. It may take time - but if you put the effort in you'll soon start getting where you want to be. Don't be afraid of starting at the bottom. What advice would you give to a Cedars student getting ready for the future? You would be surprised how much you've got to offer. You pick up all sorts of skills in the unlikeliest of places. You might have a Saturday job in a shop around Leighton - this will look good on your CV and give you a few skills to list (working in a team, maybe, or having to handle cash, or dealing with customers). Think about what you have done in the past and write down what you learnt - don't sell yourself short. Working out what you want to do is much harder than doing it, but it's also exciting becuase you can do pretty much anything if you just work out what you need to do to get there, break that down into steps, and tackle each one in turn. We all need jobs to get by in life, but you can't afford to be doing something which you hate, because for 230 days of the year you're going to be doing it - Don't do anything just because other people expect you to, or because it's highly paid, or because it's perceived to be glamourous. Think hard about what YOU want to do, and what will make YOU happy. Back to home |
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