You could smell the bodies still being washed up on the beaches in Sri Lanka two weeks after the Asian tsunami that killed thousands of people and devastated the area on December 26, 2004. Lisa Berwin, now a senior reporter at Retail Week, did not know that she would land slap-bang in the middle of such an important news story when she applied for work experience as a journalist on a two-month voluntary placement organised through i-to-i, a specialist travel firm. It was a difficult and sometimes upsetting experience, she says, but one that gave her invaluable skills and a head start over the competition when she applied for jobs back home.

Berwin graduated in media studies from Northumbria University and although she had done work experience on a local newspaper, she knew that she still had to make the most of her gap year.

“There are so many people who want to be journalists,” she says. “I thought this would be something that would look different and unusual [on my CV].”

Before the natural disaster wreaked havoc, Berwin had been travelling around New Zealand, Australia and South East Asia having fun with friends. The contrast was stark when she landed in Colombo to start working on the Daily Mirror, an English-language newspaper, but any sense of trepidation was overcome by her nascent instinct for a good story. “I thought that if there was any time to be somewhere as a journalist, that was the time to go.”

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The news editor quickly sent Berwin – with a local photographer and a driver – to report on how NGOs and the army were coping with the humanitarian effort and clean-up. She also helped out on community projects on weekends and wrote about some of the people she met. Hearing the tales of those who had lost everything was heartbreaking, but Berwin had a golden opportunity in being able to tell their stories.

“I was writing double-page features [something] that I had never done before and I was given a free rein to find my own stories. If you do work experience in England, that tends not to happen – you just make the tea.”

Back at home, Berwin decided to try to break into journalism and landed a job as an editorial assistant on a business title in eight weeks. “Without having [Sri Lanka on my CV], I wouldn’t have got anywhere because everyone I was going up against had a journalism degree,” she says.

Besides having something interesting to talk about at job interviews, Berwin’s trip gave her a huge confidence boost and yet another vital skill. “When I was there I would just have to go up to people I had never met and talk to them, which is just what you have to do in this sort of work.”

Three years on and everyday working life feels like a different world, yet, as she says: “I’ve got to where I wanted to go, pretty much.”

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