The Gateway. Careers info done right.

On a chilly evening the week before Christmas, I had the pleasure of dining at The Oxford Retreat with Mawuli Ladzekpo, Editor of The Gateway. Mawuli (currently a 3rd year PPEist from Exeter College) and I had bumped into each other at the Oxford freshers’ fair a couple of times in the past. However, the incredibly hectic environment hadn’t afforded us the opportunity to get to know one another properly. Now, months later, we were sitting in GroupSpaces’ local at a very exciting time for both of our young companies.

Onto The Gateway. Not only is it the UK’s first national student newspaper, but it’s also the first student paper in the UK to solely focus on business and finance. Together with Mawuli, it was set up by fellow Oxford students Max Lewis and Chris Wilkinson last summer. With an initial motivation to help students get jobs in investment banking, the concept has evolved and broadened to now cover consulting, law and (hopefully) a good level of information about other careers.

What I particularly like is the relevance of its content for students. Having done a few internships myself, and run the application-interview gauntlet more times than I care to remember, I understand the common pains well. For instance, here’s one situation encountered far too often: you’re starting to prepare the night before an interview. No, wait – probably 1am on the morning of a 9.30am interview. You’re weighing up the relative value of 2 hours cramming and 4 hours sleep against 4 hours of cramming and 2 hours sleep. You want a source that provides up-to-date information on the markets and current macroeconomic environment at a suitable level, and you also want a source that reminds you of the nitty gritty detail on key interview techniques. At the very least, you need to put together a few thoughtful arguments that you will fit into a good cross-section of interview scenarios.

Well The Gateway does much of the hard work for you. You pick up copies of the last couple of editions, check what the hot topics are, get the lowdown from the people who do the recruitment – so you know it’s not some off-the-wall analyst take on things, and there you have it – you’ve got your arguments right there and then. All that’s left is to check some company-specific information like the Thomson Financial rankings, recent deals and your done.

Having published the first edition on 8^th October with fortnightly 8-page copies being distributed across Oxford University for the rest of Michaelmas Term, the newspaper has just gone national, distributing tens of thousands of 24-page copies across many of the UK’s top universities.

Going back to dinner with Mawuli – during the evening he mentioned that he had come across my blog and he asked what subject I’d studied and where else I had written. When I owned up to this blog being the first time I’d written anything outside of an e-mail client or application form since my GCSE English exam, and that I was also a mathematics student, he became a little hesitant. Nevertheless, he proceeded to ask if I could write a new column on entrepreneurship for The Gateway this term.

It was an honour for me to accept, and on Wednesday, my first article was published. You can view it in its original context here (page 8).

It was my first ever experience of writing something that would be edited, and despite a significant cut in length, I’m pretty happy with the final result. Some readers have said my recent posts were too long anyway…

I’ll post the rest of the series here over the coming weeks.