Alexa Rendell

Why I picked an apprenticeship over a politics degree

From our UK edition

I’d always wanted to work in the media but had no idea how to get there. I would spend hours during sixth form trawling the pages of impressive journalists on Wikipedia, desperately trying to get some sense of what was required. My conclusion? An Oxbridge education tied most of them together. Inspired, I applied to various top universities. After getting a handful of offers, I picked a politics course at a leading institution, the University of Warwick. In the meantime, I started getting as much work experience as possible. The more I did, however, the more I realised that there were actually alternative paths into the industry. So many of the young journos I met weren’t graduates. Their route had been the government’s apprenticeship scheme.

The trouble with being called Alexa

From our UK edition

There’s no shortage of parents who failed to think through their kids’ names before signing the birth certificate. The kid in the year above at school called Poppy Field; the elderly neighbour called Stan Still. As a child, I spent a lot of time laughing with friends at those misfortunate enough to end up with a dodgy name. I never expected to end up with one myself. For years, I was perfectly happy being called Alexa. Granted, no one had really heard of it before. Apart from my name never being spelt correctly at Starbucks, I was rarely troubled by it. Then, in 2014, Amazon had the wonderful idea to bounce off Apple’s successes with Siri and produce their own virtual assistant, the Amazon echo, accompanied by its wake word, ‘Alexa’.