Why I... feel lack of work experience at university has kept me from getting a job

Helen Davey, graduate with a first-class honours in English and music

Students nationwide will soon be replacing baggy jeans and scruffy trainers with long dark robes and pointy hats as they embrace the ceremonial Oscars of the academic world. It's graduation time. But what does graduation mean?

Is it a grateful goodbye to those long hours in the library, meals of supermarket own-brand baked beans, lectures and dissertation deadlines? Probably. Is it a tearful departure from lifelong friends? Very likely.

But it is also the fearful realisation that, in spite of all your hard work, the future seems impossibly bleak, leaving you to ponder: "Was it really worth it?"

After leaving school you are faced with the difficult choice of an expensive university education or avoiding tuition debt by getting a job.

If you choose university, you are bound to be rewarded with a fantastic and lucrative career. After all, you've managed a huge workload and achieved great results, so you think you'd be the perfect employee, right? Wrong. In addition to all that, employers want you to have "work experience".

I might explode if one more person sympathises with my career quandary by telling me that trying to obtain work experience is a typical Catch-22, but the depressing fact is that these people are right. I graduated last year with a first, but I have found you can't be employed without experience and nobody is willing to employ me.

Dare you have the audacity to apply for a job without the relevant experience, you can expect one of the following results. First, the application you spent hours perfecting is humorously circulated around the office in a morale-boosting attempt to amuse pen-pushers who've been sat at the same desk since the age of two. Second, an open-minded employer calls you for interview. But as hardly anyone bothers responding to job applications these days, I can only assume that option one is happening up and down the country in a sadistic David Brent-style office near you.

If you are fortunate enough to experience option two, you start to hope. You spend your days and nights researching the company in question, you purchase a smart suit and pay travel costs to Destination Decision Time, which, of course, you are happy to do in the naive hope that it will get you somewhere. Upon leaving the interview, handshake firm and smile unwavering, you thank Mr Future Boss for his time and leave Destination Highly Possible walking on air, stopping en route to check rent prices in the local estate agents ... only to get an e-mailed rejection two weeks later. And, if you get feedback, chances are you lacked "experience".

Applying for a job without relevant work experience is as outrageous as the concept of Peter Cook's One Leg Too Few sketch, in which a one-legged man, Mr Spigott, auditions for the role of Tarzan. Mr Spigott is happily oblivious to the fact that the absence of his left leg will cause him a problem. Likewise the graduates who apply for jobs without work experience.

Perhaps the best way to ensure that all students are able to get the work experience they need is to include placements as part of their university course. The ideal would be for all degree courses to run for four years, as some already do, with the third year spent in industry.

Fees for four-year courses may indeed be higher, but if you had a full year's work experience behind you it would make finding a job so much easier. I am certain that if I had had the option of taking a year out to work, I wouldn't be writing this column now.

Helen Davey is pestering employers nationwide in a zealous attempt to kick-start her media career. helendavey77@hotmail.com