Studied: BA (Hons) Business with Sports Studies, Southampton Institute

What advice would you give to someone deciding where/what to study?
Believe it or not, the main decision should be the content and the quality of the course and not how good the nightlife is – although a good nightlife helps! Look at all aspects from accommodation/living costs, teaching standards, employment records of previous students on your course, to how the course will help you in the future.

What advice would you give someone interested in getting into marketing?
Work hard, play hard and be flexible! I started off working in sports marketing but I learnt to broaden my skills to work on a wide range of brands. Your skills need to be appealing to employers – the more you can do, the more they are likely to employ you. At the moment I am doing a lot of TV/film marketing and sponsorship, which is very exciting. I have recently handled the sponsorship of the London Film Festival for one of my clients.

You should also be prepared to study further after your degree, if necessary. Depending on your ambitions and the level that you want to reach, you may need to do professional courses after you graduate. I spent a further three years after my degree attending evening and weekend classes to obtain my Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications. I am now a Chartered Marketer and run my own company. I can earn the money I dreamt about when I started my degree. It has been hard work but worth it.

What are the most important lessons you learnt from your time at university?
Enjoy yourself but also remember the main reason why you are there: to pass your course. I saw a lot of people fail and get taken off the course, which seemed a huge waste of time, effort and money.

Did you find it easy to manage your finances at university?
Not at first. I had to learn to manage my finances and I managed to get a job in the university gym. I would suggest that you get a part-time job – it helps fund your social life and reduces the burden of debts you will have when you graduate.

Studied: Joint Honours Degree (BSc) in Geography, Physical Education and Sports Science, Loughborough University

What advice would you give to someone deciding where to study?
Make sure you ask for a copy of the prospectus and read it carefully to see if it is the place for you: is it campus based, rural or in a town or city? Also make sure that you attend any open days as this gives you a feel for the university and its location.

What advice would you give wannabe teachers?
Make sure that you gain as much experience as you can working with children of all ages, and try to organise a work experience placement in a school to see if this is the sort of environment that you would like to work in. If you want to become a PE teacher you will need a good knowledge of all sports, not just your main sport. Try to have a go at a wide variety of different sporting activities so that you have some experience of them when you start teaching.

What training did you have to do to become a teacher?
I wanted to keep my career options open so I chose to complete my degree and then do a one-year PGCE in teaching with Physical Education as my main subject and Geography as a subsidary subject. They advise you to have a second subject in case of long term injuries that might restrict you to teaching a classroom subject.

What are the most important lessons you learnt from your time at university?
It’s important to know where you want to go with your career. It is good to be focused early on so that the university can help steer you in the right direction. I also learnt to be independent very quickly, including managing my own finances and cooking for myself!

Studied: Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Masters MEng (four year course) at University College London

Did the course help with your chosen career path?
Yes, I couldn’t have done it without it. But I knew from an early age that I wanted to work in engineering in London.

What advice would you give to someone considering studying engineering?
If you’ve got an inventive or curious mind and you’ve always wondered what makes something work, how it works, do engineering. It will answer a lot of the questions for you, doing a degree in it, because you understand things, like why golf balls go faster when they’ve got dimples in them! I would also say consider doing Further Maths as well as Maths and Physics.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in engineering?
If you want to get ahead in engineering, you need to get chartered. You also need to have done an accredited Mechanical Engineering degree, that’s been accredited by the IMECHE, so find that out before you even fill in your UCAS form.

I’m currently on a training scheme with the LU to get chartered. LU is a very big company and the scheme is very well organised. We do eight placements of three months each, and you go round the company and get lots of different experience in different things.

Do you have any ultimate ambitions?
The skills I’m learning are very transferable. I could go and work on train systems all of the world, I could go and live in Hong Kong, or Vancouver.

Studied: BA English at King’s College, Cambridge

Did you enjoy your time at university?
The whole thing was a blast. It’s easy to churn out the usual clichés about making friends for life, ‘finding yourself’, growing intellectually and enjoying freedom for the first time, but that’s because they’re basically true. Otherwise, it was just a cracking three years.

What advice would you give someone interested in getting into your career?
Be patient. Journalism and publishing are hugely competitive careers and neither have direct routes in, like medicine or law. Money won’t be great to start with and your first job might not be ideal, but there are rewards eventually. I’d also recommend getting as much training on the job as possible – skills that you pick up along the way will be invaluable in helping you progress.

What are the most important lessons you learnt from your time at university?
That you get out what you put in. If I have one regret it’s not really being committed enough to my degree – I didn’t quite realise what a privileged position I was in terms of what (lecturers, libraries, facilities) was available to me, and now wish I’d made more of it.