Archive for February, 2010

FreelanceStudents Voted a 2010 Smarta 100 Winner!

smarta100-sealv1We’re very chuffed today as we have been selected as a 2010 Smarta 100 winner! Smarta.com is a popular free online business resource for small business owners.

FreelanceStudents was chosen by a judging panel including Deborah Meaden and other leading entrepreneurs such as Bebo Founder Michael Birch as a winner of Smarta.com’s inaugural ‘Smarta 100’.

According to the Smarta website:

The Smarta 100 are the most exciting, promising, disruptive new businesses, the family businesses who remain the cornerstones of communities, the innovators ploughing their own furrows in staid or declining industries, the recession-busters making a mockery of the doom and gloom, the web wonders, the teenpreneurs, mumpreneurs, olderpreneuers and, er, just about anyone who’s running a small business worth shouting about.

You can check out our Smarta 100 article here: http://bit.ly/bUBQJp and you can view the full list of final winners on http://www.smarta.com/smarta100.

iTunes Gift Card Giveaway

itunes_giftcard_2It’s competition time again! And this month we’re giving three lucky students the chance to win a £25 Apple iTunes gift card, and who doesn’t love Apple right?

This means you’ll be able to download £25 worth of your favourite hits, podcasts, films and more for free. Oh, and you avoid being hunted by the anti-illegal download whitecoats.

Competition details – ‘Refer a friend’

The competition is open to students and recent graduates. To be in with a chance of winning a £25 iTunes gift card all you have to do is follow the simple steps below:

1. Refer a friend who has a valid UK university email address (e.g. joe.blogs@ucl.ac.uk)
2. Drop us an email at support@freelancestudents.co.uk with the subject title of “Refer a friend” and provide your referral’s full name and university email address
3. Your referral registers with us
4. We contact them to say “Hello!” and when they have responded, you will then be eligible for a prize

The more referrals you provide the more chances you’ll have of winning, as each referral will be counted individually. Easy! The competition end date is 12th March.

Now, there’s one unfortunate caveat. The competition is only open to FreelanceStudents members that are UK residents, due to shipping costs for international rates. Additionally, by entering the competition we reserve the right to publish the name, university, and town of the winners on FreelanceStudents.co.uk. Note we will never publish your full name.

Good luck!

How Not To Get a Job!

your_resume_binnedIt’s been a while since we’ve updated the blog and this is largely because we’ve been focusing on a redesign for FreelanceStudents. A recent drive to recruit writers for our blog, however, has prompted us out of hibernation to provide some much needed advice to the many students out there who are simply not doing their job applications justice.

From the applications we received we found a number of common mistakes, which we’ve listed below. We imagine that many will probably think this all common sense, but for those of you that have not seen much success in getting work experience we suggest you give this article a good read and hopefully we can get you producing applications that will get you that job. Read the rest of this entry »