David Barclay volunteering at Progressio © Graham Freer/ Progressio

Student David Barclay found that volunteering was a fun and varied way to spend the summer and gave him insights into his future career.

The summer holidays can be long and lazy, but they also give you time to find out what career you might want to follow. I wanted to take that opportunity before starting my setting year at Oxford University.

So this summer, I began to look for ways I could get some work experience in an area of possible career interest. After a flurry of emails, I found myself at the international development charity Progressio.

Volunteering there appealed on many levels: it gave me something worthwhile to do with my time before term started again; it allowed me an experience of living and working in London, and it promised to give me a feel for life in the charity sector.

The Environmental Advocacy Co-ordinator, Sol Oyuela, quickly set me to work doing research on climate change and water resources.

This was all new to me, but with the regular feedback I soon came to grips with it and was able to prepare country profiles for Ecuador and Yemen which will be used as a base from which Progressio can launch further research.

Learning about countries that were literally foreign to me was a great experience, and gave me a real insight into some of the problems faced by development organisations in the 21st century.

But thankfully, I wasn't stuck at a computer permanently. The Communications Department headhunted me after a couple of weeks and set me to work on all sorts of administrative tasks: monitoring media exposure, organising the photo library and perhaps inevitably, stuffing envelopes. Volunteering gave me great opportunities to start learning about development issues.

Looking back, my decision to volunteer at Progressio was a great one. I had great fun, met some amazing people, and found out lots about what a career in development might really look like in practice.

Volunteering is a brilliant way to get stuck into serious charity work while still looking out for your own career options and personal development. I would recommend it to all young people with a passion for social justice and half an eye on their future career.