When you came out of Uni were you ready for commercial work

[Wax]

????? I dont get it I thought one of the joys of archeaology was the outside work and the physical connection with the past. Though I can appreciate the intellectual challange and do see that there is a great deal of scope for office/academic work I do not see how anyone studying archeaology cannot appreciate they are going to have to get wet and work physically hard if they are going to be any sort of field archaeologist. I personally feel that if they are not at least willing to put in the hard graft at the coal face then they do not deserve to enter the profession. As Ginger has proven the opportunities are there if you look for them.

I have spent nearly 30 years working outside (not just archaeology). I am office based at the moment and even though it is archaeology I find I am desperate to get outside again. Actually knowing what season it is and what time of day without any reference to a calender or watch seems to be a rare skill. Gods help us all if the next generation are really so disconnected from their physical environment.

[PeterM]

I was able to go straight into work from Uni - BUT had spent the equivalent of 9 months or so on excavations during the summers of my degree (including shovel scraping the Gobi Desert-like site that was West Hes! - never shifted so much spoil in such a short time at any other point in my 30 year career!!) and to be frank a lot of the graduates who went into supervising MSC funded work were so far ahead of their diggers in terms of actually knowing what archaeology was and which end of a trowel was which that we probably "got away with" a lot of things that you couldn't in modern commercial excavations - potentially only to be discovered many years later when some poor sod tried to make sense of our context sheets in the delayed post ex.

[PeterM]

"but as one pointed out to me when he's got his
degree he should be able to move up to an inside job pretty quickly "

Shelf stacking in Tesco's with that attitude - jeez, we (the ones who wanted to work in archaeology rather than just doing it as a degree) were all desperate to get out on site and dug through summer holidays and often others as well if the jobs were on!

[ginger]

Well said Peter! thats what im like, i get itchy trowel muscles as soon as the sun comes out, other students cant even tell the differance between a spade and a shovel
Drives me mad! I cant wait to graduate and get out in the field, i've felt more at home excavating while being held upside down by the ankles over a 2m deep ditch then i ever had at uni! lol