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Internships, during the summer or otherwise, are a priceless way of gaining insight into a company or business. You get to see them, and they get to see you, benefiting you both.

You will have to make your own inquiries about job opportunities rather than expecting your university department to do it for you. Some departments are particularly reluctant to have Careers Guidance Officers talk to their students, in case good students are lured away to attractive commercial jobs after graduation, rather than staying on to do post-graduate work on the pet projects that senior Professors run. Such practice is particularly common in the science subjects.

Today's charity worker is next year's corporate lawyer, and vice versa. Keeping a flexible outlook is the key. You're committing to a couple of years, not the rest of your life. Don't freeze in the headlights of decision-making and end up doing nothing at all.

In your final year at university, target very carefully what places you approach. Half a dozen would be a good number. No need for anymore if you do a proper job of it.

Companies do vary a lot in their Graduate Training Schemes. Some offer you only an afternoon with a flip-chart and coloured pens and that's that. Others send you abroad to specialist training courses, rotate you to a new job area every 6 months, appoint mentors and peer-buddies, and generally take your training and development very seriously.

Know about the organisation you're applying to. If you're not excited enough to find out about them and their industry, then ask yourself whether you really want to work for them 50 hours per week. Ditto if you weren't excited enough to do a month's internship with them during any of your college vacations.

I couldn't just go in at the top. I had to prove myself to the people I wanted to work for, and to serve a sort of apprenticeship. That's the same no matter who you are.

Just because you're good at something, doesn't mean you have to pursue it. Success can get you into a lot of trouble if you don't handle it properly, because it can take you in accidental directions. You might be good at the piano, but that doesn't mean you have to become an orchestra musician.

If you haven't got the 'normal' qualifications for a job, it needn't stop you. Simply apply to and prove yourself to the employer in an unorthodox way. Perhaps work for free for a while; or work in the same building and then get yourself noticed and appreciated, or devise some other way to demonstrate your passions, your abilities, and how useful you could be.

Identify an employer's crucial need and try to position yourself as a good solution.

Once you've identified the world you might like to work in, propel yourself towards it, and make yourself useful within it. Put yourself in the middle of the action by any means possible: running errands, working for a pittance. Don't be intimidated by the mystique and glamour of a profession, because beneath the veneer it's all about useful people getting on with other useful people.

You will only feel dissatisfied with yourself if you don't try your best, and the old adage of "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well," really does hold true.

There are probably several things that would be just right for you, but that doesn't mean you have to choose between them. You could make a very rewarding life out of a mix of things without forcing yourself into one particular pigeon-hole. I spent ages worrying about finding the one thing I would love to do above everything else, before I discovered that it didn't exist. So I built a sort of portfolio of working roles for myself that has proved very satisfying ever since.