Guy Birchall is now the first News Academy Summer School graduate to land a full time job at The Sun. Guy who attended the 2015 Summer School, was also a finalist of The Sun’s Great British Sound Off competition. He speaks of his meteroic rise from unemployed University grad to full time national journalist.

A YEAR ago I was sat at home in Staffordshire two thirds of the way through a Journalism Masters wondering if I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

Fortunately I managed to get an internship, and in June I headed down to London for two weeks at a website called Spiked Online.

It was there that I had the luck of meeting Viv Regan, one of the organisers of the News Academy and she told me about the competition they were running with The Sun- The Great British Sound Off.

I sent off two hundred words not expecting much to come of it. Come on, the bestselling newspaper in the country, what are the chances they’d give me a shot when I was being ignored by local papers I sent my CV to? Well remarkably they thought I wasn’t all that bad and so I was selected for the News Academy’s Summer School.

So in August I headed down to The News Building in London and was tasked with making a newspaper from scratch with a group of other aspiring journalists. What followed was one of the most intense but most fulfilling experiences of my life.

In a whirlwind of a week I was working with some of the finest journalists in the business and meeting columnists I’d read avidly since I was a teenager.  Discussing interviewing Prime Ministers and Presidents with Trevor Kavanagh was an experience I could never have achieved if not for the Summer School.

Likewise being compared to a member of Boyzone (still don’t know which one) by Robert Crampton is an experience not easily forgotten and I still don’t know if it was a compliment or not.

We even got a trip out to the Broxbourne printing presses to literally pick up the paper we’d made.

Now as a direct result of that frantic week scrambling to create a newspaper I’m working on the website of the best-selling newspaper in Britain- The Sun. From the contacts I made on that week I was able to secure two weeks working on The Sun’s online breaking news team. At that point I was just thrilled to be actually getting paid for my writing but eventually two weeks became a month and a month became six.

During my time I’ve covered the Brussels Attacks, Terry Wogan’s death and Adam Johnson’s trial amongst dozens of other stories. Every day is different and the team on the website is brimmed with talented and experienced journalists who have helped build on the knowledge I gained from my week with the News Academy.

The News Academy Summer School is an invaluable experience for any aspiring journalist and has given my career a leg up I never could have achieved any other way.