Close-Up: Live Issue - Diageo gives students a taste of real advertising agency life.

Will Bingham and Victoria Daltrey recently completed Diageo's graduate scheme.

Each year, Diageo asks the creative directors of its advertising agency roster to select the best team from that year's graduates and then give them placements.

Victoria Daltrey and Will Bingham won the right to work on placement at J. Walter Thompson, Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and Bartle Bogle Hegarty over the past 12 months (the Watford graduates Sam Butterfield and Miranda Abbs have been chosen to take part in the scheme in the coming year).

Daltrey and Bingham take up their first full-time position, at BBH, on 1 September. Here they outline their experiences over the past 12 months:

It was in a pub in Victoria that we got the call. We were sitting, contemplating what to do next, which agencies to contact, which creative directors to harass and how to improve our book.

Within a two-minute phone call our worries and anxieties had vanished.

We had been gifted a golden ticket into three of the biggest and most prestigious agencies in the land and, more importantly, an opportunity to try to gain that which is so elusive: a job in advertising. As you can imagine we were ecstatic, but having previously only been on placement at one other agency, it was also a daunting prospect.