What They Wish You'd Asked

Three practitioners, one from each field, fifteen minutes each, in the one shared slot. You hear all three, including the two from fields you are not in, and that is the point rather than an accident of timetabling.

Each guest is hosted by their stream’s convenor and is given the same brief: not career advice in general, but the specific question they wish entry-level candidates had asked them, and what not asking it cost those candidates. They are asked to be concrete and to name figures where their field allows it.

• Technical — hosted by Anselm Pike. What scope and level actually mean on an offer, what a team allocation commits you to for a year, and how much unpaid work a take-home is quietly assuming.
• Creative and Communications — hosted by Nadia Ferrante. Rates, usage rights, and the test brief. The rights conversation is the one nobody has at twenty-two and everybody re-litigates at twenty-eight.
• Commercial and Public — hosted by Sunil Raman. What is genuinely fixed by policy, what is not, and why the graduate who asks about rotation preference in the right week gets it while the one who asks in the wrong week does not.

Hearing the other two fields does something the negotiation reading cannot. You discover that your own conventions are conventions: the technical students learn that an unpaid test brief is a live ethical argument somewhere, and the creative students learn that a salary band can be a published document. Both leave with a better sense of what the negotiation flinch is actually defending against.

Guests appear as roles rather than as personalities and are not recruiting. Take notes on questions, not on people — the questions transfer between organisations and the people do not.

Fifteen minutes each leaves a quarter of an hour at the end for cross-field questions, which is where the useful disagreements happen. Bring one. This afternoon’s tutorial is where you say the number out loud, so arrive at it with the number already chosen.