Doing part-time work alongside your degree at LSE is a great way to supplement your living expenses while living in London. Initially, you might think that there won’t be time for work alongside your degree. But flexible part-time work, as opposed to full-time employment, means that working alongside your degree becomes manageable. Your degree should be your top priority at LSE. You shouldn’t let work get in the way. But working part-time provides life experience, perspective and a sense of achievement that is not found in your degree and so is definitely worth doing.

The platform that I’ve used to secure part-time work as a student is STINT.  STINT has connections to hundreds of hospitality and catering chains in London. The idea of STINT is simple. When their affiliated businesses need someone to cover a shift for one of their workers, they contact STINT and ask them to provide a worker. STINT workers are offered a competitive salary to account for being hired on short notice (never more than one week). You’re never asked to carry out tasks on shifts that require any previous training. On the rare occasion you’re asked to do something that’s not already outlined to you when you’re offered the shift, I’ve found staff to be very helpful in assisting you. A great perk of STINT is that most businesses will offer you free food after your shift as well!

I’ve found STINT very flexible because I can just pick up shifts when it suits me. At popular times of the year, like Christmas time and summer, you could easily get hold of upwards of 10-15 hours of work per week. But equally, you’re not obligated to pick up any work at times of the year when you need to focus on assessments and deadlines. After a while, once you do a number of successful shifts at particular venues, those businesses may specifically request you via STINT in advance of advertising the shift to other “stinters”. In a similar vein, if you regularly work to a high standard at a particular venue, it may even be that they offer you an official part-time role there instead, as happened to me! And so, STINT can also be used as a sort of trial or springboard to secure good part-time work that you know you’ll enjoy. So I’d highly recommend all incoming students to give STINT a try.

But of course, there are drawbacks to STINT in that you don’t work in the same environment with the same people all the time. If you’re someone who values familiarity over flexibility, this may not be the right sort of part-time work for you. Lots of students may have already experienced working in hospitality or catering or may even have decided it’s simply not for them. Another way of securing part-time work is on the LSE CareerHub.  LSE CareerHub offers all kinds of part-time work from research positions, to volunteering, to eventing and even to blogging! These kind of positions tend to offer more fixed hours with greater commitment, guaranteeing work all year round and more security.

Another service offered on LSE CareersHub is tutoring roles. But LSE CareersHub is not the only path to becoming a tutor. Many of my friends are tutors, in some cases working independently, some working private and the rest working with other tutoring companies. Tutoring can be done remotely which means there’s less travelling needed which may appeal to many. You can also choose what age range you wish to tutor. I find many prefer to tutor at 11+ level whereby the level of work being taught isn’t too strenuous and perhaps the signs of improvement are quicker to see. But this is incredibly rewarding work as you can see and feel in real time that you are making a difference to young people’s lives.

I hope in this blog, I have shown a few types of part-time work students can get while studying at LSE that is enjoying and fulfilling.