Isabella Goodridge

Can you give an overview of your current role and employer?

I am an Account Hub Assistant at Channel 4 and my main role is providing administrative and logical thinking and operational support to not only the account management team, but also the commercial team. The role involves manually booking and managing the campaign setup for adverts within Channel 4.

How did your undergraduate course prepare you for work?

I like the research, the strategy, looking deeper into things. From my dissertation, I did a corpus linguistic analysis on love and relationships in song lyrics. Having a huge amount of data to work with, honing down, asking why—that was the biggest takeaway.

Working across disciplines and applying linguistic knowledge to the media industry was something I focused on throughout. People often say linguistics is more of a science than the arts, and using deeper thinking in terms of numbers, why things happen using quantitative rather than qualitative data, has definitely helped in this job.

I've never seen so many spreadsheets in my entire life. Going from English Language and Linguistics to dipping your toe into different methods of finding things out through research has definitely helped.

Did you use Careers Network or other support services?

The most beneficial thing for me was looking at internships. With an English Language and Linguistics degree, because it doesn’t narrow you into one type of job, looking at internships showed me what is out there. The job I have now, I never would have known existed.

Seeing what's out there and thinking: what is that? What skills are needed? What skills do I have? You don’t need one specific degree. 

Using those resources to immerse yourself in everything out there was the most helpful.

What is your top tip for current students preparing to graduate?

Don't be afraid of change. Don't be afraid if the path you thought you'd take doesn't end up being the one you want. Don't be scared that it's too late—it’s definitely not. Try to immerse yourself in everything and take advantage of everything out there.

Engage in extracurricular activities. I was Vice President of the Ballroom and Latin Society for two and a half years. I organised and hosted a charity event that raised thousands of pounds. Those skills helped build a picture of why they should hire me.

What were the highlights of your course and university experience?

In second year we had a research project with an outside employer involving linguistic material. My group worked with the speech and language therapy department at the QE Hospital. We had meetings with an employee of the SLT team and ended up winning “Most Organised Team” for our presentation and research.

Finishing my dissertation was also amazing. The department put on a poster conference. I made a poster and presented it to incoming third years and staff. It was lovely seeing lecturers who taught me in first year coming to see my dissertation poster.

As Vice President of the society, we were shortlisted as Outstanding Activity of the Year for the charity money we raised. Last year we raised money for St Basil’s (£2,000), and this year for Birmingham Children’s Hospital (£2,500).