It wasn’t quite planes, trains and automobiles, but it was tubes, trains and trundling down a country lane with a trolley case which resulted in me arriving at the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) headquarters in Cookham, Berkshire.
Ironically, the multitude of transport hadn’t been the challenging part of getting to the chocolate box village of Cookham where this year’s Marketing Academy Scholarship was kicking off with a mental (rather than physical) Bootcamp!
The hard bit had actually been the four stage application process, which took four months and reduced 600 initial applicants to a final cut of just 30 people.
Having applied the year before and falling at the first hurdle, this time I was determined to do my best to stand out. Getting to the finish line was a tough process with different challenges at each stage:
Stage one – initial application
I did a Breaking Bad inspired application and my ‘Showcase Me’ creative piece was a confessional video giving an insight into the professional and personal challenges I’d faced!
I not only sent the video as a YouTube link, but also as a DVD in a bucket of bright blue jelly beans that were meant to represent the meth that Walter White/Heisenberg so (un)successfully cooks up!
It was of course a risk and most people I mentioned the idea to initially didn’t get it, but they did come around. I thought do or die – and was willing to be told I’d completely missed the mark and it was wholly inappropriate to send in a fake bucket of drugs!
Stage two – the telephone interview
Thankfully, I knew the ‘meth’ jelly bean bucket hadn’t caused major offence when I got through to the second stage and my telephone interviewer opened with ‘Hi, it’s Heisenberg here!’.
The first question was what I would ask Walt (or his meth cooking alter ego Heisenberg) if I actually got to meet him – not quite what I expected, but it was a great test of whether I could think on my feet. I said I’d explore his moral ambiguity and how much bad egg/good egg he was – and this appeared to do the trick!
Stage three – online tests
The third stage consisted of five psychometric tests, which took me back to my university and even school days! The maths test in particular was like doing my GCSE all over again and required the use of a 1980s style oversized calculator.
One of the questions was about what time my watch would show in a week’s time if it was running slow and I caught the same time train every day. Initially, all I could think was I would buy a new watch, but unfortunately that wasn’t one of the multiple choice answers. And the aim here wasn’t to test my pragmatism, but rather my mathematical skills!
The fourth and final stage – the panel interview
At this point the 600 applicants had been whittled down to 60 final interviewees. I was heartened by the fact I had a 50/50 chance.
I even had a moment where I thought I could actually do this and get through! Part of the reason I felt this way was that I’d earlier told my mum I was doing something which was like ‘The X Factor of Marketing’ – because it was a rather competitive process. She took it a little too literally and/or I didn’t explain it fully, so she thought there was just one (not 30) scholarships on offer! Now somehow the odds seemed much greater just because of a simple misunderstanding!
And so, I set off to the interview with two marketing big cheeses feeling a mix of excitement and apprehension – wearing a black and white striped dress and patent shoes with bows on them! I wanted to be myself and as a lover of spots and stripes I thought I should have at least one of them in my outfit! My interviewers opened by saying neither of them had seen Breaking Bad and things didn’t look good, but the mood quickly picked up when they said they got the idea anyway.
The biggest learning of all…
Whilst my interview attire might seem like an unnecessary detail – it feels quite important because applying for the Marketing Academy Scholarship is like no other process I have been through before! It was of course tough, but this was to be expected. The part I didn’t expect was just how much they were looking for people who were being themselves and not pretending they were something they thought they should be!
