Sorry guys been busy with CA exams and all- surprised none of the other cadets/ex-cadets on here have responded.
I'm thinking about applying. I have a few questions though:
How demanding is a business cadetship really?
It's demanding. Takes a lot of time and at the end of the day it's a
FULL TIME JOB. Can't stress this point enough. Imagine what you are doing now for school- that is, 8:30am to 3pm every day. Now stretch that to 5pm or 6pm. And remove your school holidays. That's what a full time job is and I know I'm probably not selling it very well here but I think a lot of people who sign up for cadetships forget this key point.
Also keep in mind you'll have uni on top of this.
Is it hard to balance work and study?
Depends on you as a person. One of the reasons they ask you about extra curricular involvement is to gauge how well you cope with multiple pressures on you at the same time. I personally didn't find it too bad because I was disciplined in my approach of working during the week, going out on Friday nights and Saturday, but buckling down on Sunday to study. As a cadet you're only doing a half load at uni anyway (i.e. 2 subjects per semester) which makes it a lot easier, and most of the firms nowadays give you a full 7.5 hours off (i.e. 1 day of work) per week during semester to attend uni/study/etc so essentially you only have to work 4 days a week but you get 5 days of pay. Pretty decent IMO.
Will it use all the free time that you would have had otherwise? (i.e. less social life?)
To a degree your socialising time will be cut down because you have a full time job. Yes you'll have a reduced study burden since 2 subjects is definitely a LOT easier than 4 (largely because when exam time rolls around you only have 2 things to worry about rather than 4 in a short space of time), but at the end of the day, a large chunk of your week will be committed to working rather than free time. That being said, if you balance your time out and are disciplined, you can have fun during the week (I used to go gym after work on days where I didn't have night class) and I went out on Fridays and Saturdays... but you need to balance it yourself. Noone will help you do this.
I know this post sounds very negative but I'm trying to hit the point hard here because there's a lot of people who do apply and don't realise what they're getting themselves into. Your friends at least initially will probably start to become a bit distant to you because you work every day whilst they are chillaxing, playing sport, going to movies, etc... but realistically a lot of them will end up working part time at Maccas or something which means they wont be so free to hang out anyway, and once the first year of Commerce has gone by, suddenly everyone becomes interested in every society to bulk up their CV and get themselves an internship or failing that, a grad job.
Regardless of all of the above though, if you're interested in the field which the cadetship is for (presumably accounting?) then go for it. It's a great way to get a foot in the door, you'll learn plenty and better yet, you get paid and don't need to worry about grad jobs later on. Or even if you don't like it, you've got great experience on your CV which will help you move onto other jobs.
Hope this helps.
I don't think there's ever been an ICAA function over the past few years where someone didn't go "hey are you that sir-emm-iffy dude from bos?"!