with a work history like mine, "relevant work experience" requires a real stretch of the imagination - luckily, I am pretty good at that already.

I came at advertising sideways. A publishing degree from the University of Pretoria, five years teaching English in South Korea, a stint tutoring copy-editing and InDesign, editorial work that most recently had me reading Richell Prize submissions for Hachette Australia two years in a row. Somewhere in there I also ran the multimedia team at a student paper, built product displays for bathroom showrooms across Australia, and sold coffee to two hundred people an hour.

AWARD School is the only bit that was on purpose.