Every year, The Brunel Writer Prize is awarded to the student with the highest graded article submission for the Creative Industries module on Brunel University’s Creative Writing Programme. This year’s winner is Jess Mival – congratulations Jess! Jess draws on her experience of freelancing to provide her fellow students with some excellent advice on…

How Not to Freelance at Uni

It’s 2am on a Wednesday night or, I suppose, a Thursday morning. You have a lecture in seven hours but haven’t slept because you have a work deadline in twelve hours. You’re hungry; you’ve only had three potato waffles and four diet cokes in the last fourteen hours.

            What’s wrong with this picture?

Juggling work alongside university is hard. Anyone who says it is easy, is lying. Anyone who says it is manageable, is not lying. They’re annoying, but they’re not lying. I decided to #girlboss my way through uni and start freelancing, for many reasons. Working for myself? Amazing. Choosing my own hours? Stunning. Getting to say things like ‘just need to hop on a call with one of my clients’? Sensual. I signed up with Paperound, a website that helps students get freelance jobs, and started getting work quickly, saying ‘yes’ to pretty much any task requests that came my way.

Flash forward a couple weeks and the work is piling up. It’s only the beginning of term so it’s fine for me to prioritise work at the moment, right? I’ll just miss that lecture; I can watch it back online and I really want to take on this new client and I know I missed last week but I’m not feeling very well at the moment anyway.

And it’s all going great! It’s so great and fine and great! I’m drowning in uni deadlines and one of my clients wants me to rewrite the last 1000-word article and another wants me to create six more social posts by 5pm and I’ve had a headache for two weeks and I’ve run out of diet coke but I’m great!

            Again. what’s. wrong. with. this. picture?

Spoiler alert: everything wasn’t fine. The classes I missed, or slacked to prioritise work, were the ones I ended up getting my lowest grades in, and I wasn’t producing the best quality work for my clients either. This is what I mean when I say working alongside uni isn’t easy, but it is manageable. You can juggle both whilst staying (sort of) sane, it just requires a little bit of that dreaded time management.

Now that you’ve seen how not to do it, I’ll try and actually be helpful. Something that really made a difference to me was completely separating my uni time from my work time. If you have a class 9-12, try and spend the afternoon doing uni work rather than work work. Realistically, you shouldn’t put yourself in a situation where you are having to spend every hour outside of your classes doing your freelance work. If you have classes all throughout the week, spend time at the weekend doing your freelance jobs or, if you have a weekday off, spend that day doing them.

If you really want to make it all work, I’d suggest getting a planner or at least writing stuff down on your notes app. Doing a to-do list might sound like the most mundane of solutions, but they’re so much more helpful than you think! Plus, if you write down things like “eat lunch” and “brush hair” you get to tick more off, which is way more fun than it should be.

Let’s head over to present day, shall we? It’s 6pm on a Thursday night and you’re closing your laptop. You’ve finished up an article for one client and four social posts for another and you’re now getting to tick those bits off your list. Your list for tomorrow is completely university-related, plus watching an episode of whatever terrible reality TV show is on. You’re going to make your dinner. It will be pasta, but it will have vegetables in it. Probably. Your life is not 10000% together but you are managing. That’s all you can do, really, is manage, and you’re doing it pretty well.