Friday, April 6, 2012

The Adventure Begins


After telling a few people about my planed adventure to a field school in the United Kingdom I was requested by friends to write a blog about it so they can follow my adventures and possibly live vicariously through me :)

Last year in November I graduated from the University of Queensland with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Archaeology. This is the minimum qualification to work as an archaeologists. Well after many many applications I have been told I do not have the experience to be employed. Apparently mock field work and volunteer lab work while at UQ is not enough to get a job in the real world. Who would have thought? So what could I do about it? I sent out my cv to consultantcy companies begging for experience and many said yes. I thought it was great, yay I was going to get experience locally and maybe even get paid to do it. Well no it hasn't turned out that simple. I have contacted the companies again and again, and have been repeatedly told that they would love to give me some experience when work comes in. It's now mid-April and I haven't had any work experience. 

I am currently working at a gourmet pizza shop casually so I decided to put all my wages into going to an international field school. I started looking around the internet at field schools. I came across this website  that lists field schools by country. I was randomly clicking through the different field schools when I found the Bamburgh Research Project. From the image below I was sold. This was the field school I wanted to go to. It was like a dream come through, I mean seriously, just look at the photo. So I did the maths, looked at flights and looked at the fees. 


The image below shows the rough locations of the castle in relations to the United Kingdom. Both images came from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamburgh_Castle


I made some enquires to the site director, he explained that you could choose to go from one week to eight weeks. I worked out that I could afford to go to three of the eight weeks that the summer season dig runs for. I contacted some friends in London and booked my flights and paid the deposit on the field school. 

I have structured the trip so I have just over a week in London to see the sites and catch up with the many sca friends who have moved over there. I will also be catching up with a great aunty whom I have not seen in more than ten years. I leave Australia on the 25th of May and return on the 30th of June. This means for the first time in my life I will not be with my family for my birthday, my mother's birthday or my brother's birthday.

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