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The sections of a university website that all new students need to know

When you become a university student for the first time–as we know many of you will be doing over the next couple of weeks–the first week is probably about 80% social-life related and no more than 20% or so linked to the basic administrative business of registering and getting ready for the coming semester of study.

But the week after that, those two percentages are more or less reversed (well, depending on how diligent a student you are). The switch can come as a bit of a nasty shock for the student who is not prepared for it. Having spent the last week floating around freshers’ events, they’re now being expected to know things like how to access course reading lists and access journal articles.

However, help is at hand, though you need to know where to look for it. And where to look is online, at your university’s website. Although when you log onto your university’s homepage the pictures of smiling students posing for the camera may make you think it’s just a tool for selling the university to prospective students, it will also be packed with information and resources that you will need to survive as a student. It therefore pays to get to know which sections of the site will be of most use to you. And they’ll be the following:

The library site

Your university’s library will have a sizable website all of its own. Its use extends far beyond providing you with library opening hours. For one thing, it’ll host the all-important online catalogue of books, journals and electronic resources that students need to survive their degree. But wait, there’s more! Not only will it in many cases provide you with links to digital versions of said books and articles, but it’ll also have all sorts of resources that will explain how to navigate your way through the dense forest of study materials that you’ll be expected to consult, as well as help you to understand areas such as plagiarism.

Moodle, Blackboard or other virtual learning environment

A typical first-semester exchange between a lecturer and students will go like this: students turn up to a seminar having done no work beforehand. Lecturer asks why they didn’t do the reading they’d been set. Students say they didn’t know there was any. Lecturer says the work to be done was all available on Moodle/Blackboard/some other oddly named website. Students stare back blankly.

Most universities nowadays will use some sort of virtual learning environment as the backbone for course business, from sending out reminders about essays to providing lecture notes, reading lists, links to reading materials and course handbooks. In other words, if you’re not actively and regularly using the VLE, you’re probably setting yourself up for the awkward situation described above.

Exam timetables and study regulations

Unlike when you’re at school, university students are expected to look up all the rules governing life for themselves. But because many of these rules and procedures are different to what they experienced at school, many students are blissfully unaware of them. The result is that people get themselves into a pickle by inadvertently committing plagiarism, show up to the wrong exams or aren’t allowed to sit them because they didn’t bring their university ID with them.

Again, all these things can be avoided if you take the time to look the information up on the university’s website. Like out in the real world, universities won’t accept ignorance as an excuse for breaking their rules, and especially not when they publish all of them online.

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Important dates for UCAS applications

The new school year normally brings with it for Year 13 students a flurry of excitement related to UCAS applications. Starting from the first week of term an enthusiastic babble about university choices, personal statements and predicted grades takes hold in common rooms and classrooms at schools and sixth-form colleges across the length and breadth of Great Britain. And it’s not difficult to understand why. Going to university is a big and exciting experience, and UCAS applications are your ticket for a place on the ride.

What often gets hidden under all this commotion, however, is the fact that UCAS applications are always tied to a strict calendar of submission deadlines. Fail to get everything sent off in time for the deadline that applies to you, and you could see yourself unable to apply for the course or university of your choice for that year.

While some schools and colleges run a tight ship and make sure their students put in their UCAS applications in good time, others take a much more relaxed and light-touch approach. Unfortunately, this often leads to students being unaware of deadlines for UCAS applications and missing the boat.

So it’s really important to know about the key deadlines for UCAS applications, and whether they apply to the course and university that you want to apply to. Here are the main ones for the 2013/2014 school year:

15 October: The application deadline for applications to study medicine, veterinary science and dentistry, or for application to Oxford or Cambridge universities

As you can see, this deadline is only a little more than a month away. And the thing about the courses and universities that fall into this categories is that they’re the elite ones, where only the most perfectly polished personal statement will get you in. In other words, you can’t just cobble something together on 13th October for these ones and expect to have a realistic chance. The moral of the story, then, is to get cracking with your application right now!

15 January: The deadline for sending your application for all other courses (except some art and design ones) if you want to make sure that the university will definitely consider your application

This is really the key deadline for the majority of UCAS applications. Although people can still send off new UCAS applications after this date (all the way up until the end of September 2014, in fact), universities are under no obligation to consider them. This means that if the course you are applying to is likely to be a popular one whose admissions officers will be swamped with applications, you’d be well advised to get your application in before 15 January.

24 March: The application deadline for certain art and design courses

This is a bit of a niche deadline that only applies to a limited range of art/design courses. We’ve included it here so that 1) if you’re going to apply for an art and design course you’re reminded to check if this deadline applies to you; and 2) so everyone else is in no doubt that this deadline does not apply to them, and they should be looking firmly at the 15 October or 15 January deadlines for their UCAS applications instead!

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Tips for managing your student finances

Are you excited about starting your first year of uni later this month? We bet you are, and then some. Right from freshers’ week onwards it’s going to be a carnival of new friends and new experiences; and you’ll even be spending a fair chunk of your time studying a subject that you love. Yep, in terms of social and academic life there’ll be nothing to worry about. But what you may find, however, is that there will be one area of life that could catch you out: your student finances.

Student finances prove to be tricky in part, of course, because you have relatively little money to play with. However, what really gets people into a right old mess with their student finances is their poor budgeting and money management. As you hopefully won’t learn because it’s a situation you won’t get yourself into, there are few things more depressing than seeing that you’re well into your overdraft with several weeks to go until your next student loan payment comes in.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A light-touch approach to keeping tabs on your money is all that you need. Here are some key tips from reformed student-loan overspenders on how they got their student finances under control.

1) Work out a weekly amount of money available

We imagine that you’ve read this tip and groaned. “What, you expect me to budget for every item of food and every pint I have each week?” you are asking incredulously. Well, no, actually. Because we’re realists, and we know that student life is all about spontaneity.

What we’re suggesting instead is working out how much money you will have available each week if you divide up your total student loan amount between the number of weeks it has to last, and then make sure that the amount you spend stays within that limit each week. This way you can stay flexible in terms of how you spend your money, while at the same time keeping a lid on overall expenditure.

If you’re really sensible, what you can do is work out how 90% of your student loan payment spreads out over the weeks, and then keep 10% of it in reserve as contingency in case you do find that one week you overshoot on your student finances.

2) Keep your student loan payments in a separate bank account to the one your debit card is connected to

Tip #2 is designed to make sure that you can execute tip #1 properly. If you have immediate access to your entire student loan it’s a lot more difficult to make sure you are sticking to your weekly budget. But with internet banking it’s much easier to make sure that you don’t fall into this trap. All you need to do is keep the student loan in the instant savings account that is connected to your current account (a feature that most bank accounts have nowadays) and then transfer your weekly lump of cash into your current account at the start of each week.

3) Pay in cash when possible

This tip will also help you to make sure you track your purchases. If you pay for everything on card–especially the little things–it’s a lot easier to lose all sense of how much you’ve spent in the week. But by going to the cash machine, the cycle of going to the cash machine, spending it and then going back again when you run out of cash will give you a much clearer idea of how much you’re spending.

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Big graduate CV mistakes to avoid

So, you completed your university finals this June. Since then you’ve had a well-earned break, perhaps with a bit of travelling or part-time work thrown into the bargain. But now summer is coming to an end; it’s time to get one of those job things. A proper graduate one at that. But your efforts to date haven’t proved too successful, and now you’re worried that you’re destined to join the legions of other unemployed graduates, victims one and all of the current recession. But could it be that the problem is in fact that your graduate CV is not up to scratch?

You certainly wouldn’t be the first person fresh out of uni whose graduate CV was selling them short and therefore preventing them from getting a graduate job. Employers are used to–and tired of–wading through piles of CVs from young graduates and final-year students who are in fact highly capable but whose graduate CV is a total mess, littered with mistakes and full of irrelevant information or ridiculous claims.

Making sure your graduate CV doesn’t end up on the rejection pile by avoiding these all-too-common mistakes.

1: Making an overly long graduate CV that is full of irrelevant information

When you’re making the step up to applying for graduate jobs, it’s tempting to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the graduate CV. You want to use every possible fragment of evidence from your past to demonstrate the breadth and depth of your skillset. The end result that you produce: a fifteen-page graduate CV that includes such gems as your participation in a Year 8 student council meeting and the seminal experience of a school trip to Germany when you were thirteen.

An employer’s response to this magnum opus when it lands on their disk: sweeping it into the bin.

Employers just don’t have the time or inclination to read through such lengthy CVs for graduate recruitment. The rule of thumb is that your CV gets longer as you gain more professional experience, with an upper limit of about four pages for people going for the most senior positions (unless the industry they work in plays by a different code). Everyone knows that, realistically, a person in their early twenties–or even in their thirties, for that matter–does not have enough experiences that can relate directly to the professional world to fill more than a couple of pages of A4.

2: Using the CV you’ve used in the past to apply for part-time/casual work as a graduate CV

This is the opposite mistake to writing an overly long graduate CV. Here our graduate just assumes that all CVs are roughly the same, and so sticks with what got them a shelf-stacking position when they were seventeen.

However, the demands of a graduate job are entirely different to this sort of work, and a good graduate CV will reflect this. It will focus on skills like problem solving, critical thinking, leadership and presentation skills, and also contain some sort of statement of career ambitions, rather than simply providing a list of previous employment and qualifications.

3): Not formatting and checking through your graduate CV properly

Many people see gathering together the information required to make a graduate CV as the final thing the final thing they have to do before they send of their job application. What they don’t realise is that all the work they’ve put into working out the best keywords to go with each piece of their employment history or the parts of their degree to emphasise goes to waste if what they send off to employers is visually speaking a disorganised mess that is also full of typos. So take the time to experiment with different layout options, and make sure you proofread everything thoroughly.

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Can I still—and should I—try and find a place through clearing?

If you received your A Level results last month but either did not have a university place lined up or did not meet your UCAS offer, and if since then you haven’t yet used clearing to get a place at university, at this point in September you may find yourself in a bit of a dilemma: Should I try–or even can I still try–to find a place at university for the 2013/2014 academic year, or should I hold fire and apply for entry in 2014?

This dilemma has both a “should” and a “can” element to it; let’s look at the “can” bit first. Even though it’s September and many universities start their new terms in the next couple of weeks, you can in fact still make a fresh UCAS application and find a place until clearing at this stage in the game. Clearing in fact runs all the way up to the end of this month, though you’ll need to complete a UCAS application by 20th September.

All this means that, as of today, you still have two weeks to put together a UCAS application from scratch if you haven’t previously submitted one, and over three weeks to find, get accepted on, and firmly accept a place.

So, the steps you’ll need to take are the following: 1) put together your UCAS application (if you haven’t put one together already); 2) establish what course you want to do; 3) consult the list of clearing vacancies (either through UCAS or The Daily Telegraph‘s service); 4) research the courses you’re interested in through the university’s website and get in touch with the university to express your interest in the course and find out more about whether it’s for you and whether they’d be interested in your application; 5) if you’re happy with the course and the university has indicated they’d like to accept you, put in an application to the course using the UCAS online system, and then firmly accept the offer once the university has made you one; 6) jump around and start getting excited about heading off to university.

Now, let’s get on to the “should” end of things. The key thing here is whether you feel the circumstances are right for you to go to uni this year, or whether you’d in fact benefit from waiting a year. In addition to important questions such as your financial circumstances, the key thing here is whether you feel applying now through clearing will get you a place on a course that will fulfil your interests and your academic potential.

Although clearing offers loads of great courses, it doesn’t offer the full selection that is available at the start of the UCAS cycle. So if you’re looking through the clearing lists and struggling to find something that really captures your imagination, it may well be worth waiting to apply in the next UCAS cycle, when the full range of courses will be open again.

A second important academic consideration is whether or not you’d be able to get onto a course that was a better fit for you if you spent a year either retaking A Levels, doing additional ones, or gaining some other form of training or work experience. If you feel this is the case, then it would probably make more sense in the long term to make the short-term sacrifice of a year spent paying your dues and getting ready to do a course you truly wanted to do rather than just settling for one based simply on the criterion of them being willing to accept you.

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Great apps for the new term

Now that the new term is upon us, it’s finally time to face up to the fact that the holiday routines we’ve developed over the summer need to be packed up and put away for another year. Out go the lie-ins, lazy days and late nights, and in comes homework, homework and more homework.

Adapting to the new term and the return to school can always be a bit of a drag, even if you see yourself as a particularly motivated student who is looking to make the most of the new term. Thankfully, there’s no need to feel like you’re just being thrown in at the deep end. Because there are tons of apps out there that can help you dive right into the new term and develop effective study habits and keep on top of your workload right from day one. Here are some of our favourites.

myHomework Student Planner

Undoubtedly one of the toughest things about the new term is getting back into the rhythm of doing homework. The problem isn’t that you’re lazy or demotivated, but instead that you’ve had close to two months of not having to do any homework at all and so are out of the habit of planning your time effectively. So what you need is a little nudge to help you stay organised.

MyHomework Student Planner is just the app to help you do this. It contains all the tools you need to track the homework you have to do and schedule when you’re going to do it, and it even lets you set reminders to make sure you don’t let any assignments slip through the cracks.

Habit Streak

The new term offers a great opportunity to develop more effective study habits that will help you both improve your grades and find the day-to-day demands of school work easier to handle. The problems with developing habits, though, is that you can’t just click your fingers and adopt them perfectly. You need to set yourself goals and monitor your progress.

This is the idea behind Habit Streak. It’s a great app that makes you set your goals and then expects you to keep it updated with how many of them you’re achieving each day. It stores your progress and lets you see exactly how well you’re doing.

Vocabulary-learning apps

One of the most onerous challenges of studying a language is that you constantly need to keep on top of vocabulary. This isn’t just a question of learning new words, but also making sure that familiar ones stay remembered and on the tip of your tongue. If you can develop good vocabulary-learning habits, however, you’ll be rewarded with fantastic grades.

With “little and often” being the best way to approach vocabulary learning, it’s a skill that was practically designed to be mastered through apps, which are the ultimate vehicle for doing things in small doses. And there are hundreds of vocabulary-learning apps out there. Some are specific to a particular language, while others cover dozens of them; and some of them let you add in new vocab, while others focus on helping you revise what you’ve already learnt. Just have a look on your device’s app store and have an experiment to find the app that works best for your language and way of learning!

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Making the transition from GCSEs to A Levels

For millions of children heading back to school or college this week or next, the new school year will be simply a question of picking up where they left off, whether they’re moving from Year 8 to Year 9, heading into the second year of GCSEs or trading their AS Levels in for A2s. For one group of students, however, this week will herald a big change: the transition from GCSEs to A Levels.

Having previously had to juggle eight or nine subjects, you’re now going to be concentrating on just four or so. But boy will you be concentrating on them. The level of detail you be going into with your A Levels is going to make GCSEs seem almost adorably simple.

Now, while after two years of studying A Levels you’ll feel like an all-conquering intellectual powerhouse who has mastered some truly tricky disciplines, it may well be that in your first few weeks–or even term–back at school you’ll instead feel like a lost little child. This is because A Levels represent a huge change to GCSEs, and as such you’ll never have experienced anything quite like it in the classroom before.

But fret not. For while we can’t make any promises that it’ll be easy making the transition to A Levels, we can warn you of the major differences that cause people headaches in their first months of Year 12. And if you know these hurdles are coming, you can start developing the good study habits that’ll have you acing your A Levels from day one.

The material just keeps on coming

Probably the first big difference about A Levels that you’ll notice is that your teachers through more subject material at you. Much, much more, in fact. Within a few weeks of study you’ll have realised that what seemed quite simple subjects at GCSE are in fact much more intense and complicated. If you study languages, you’ll learn more grammar in a month than you had ever done in the previous years of studying them combined; if you study sciences those tricky equations you mastered for your GCSE’s will seem like child’s play.

More work at home than just homework

So how do A Level students deal with all this extra material they’re expected to learn? Well, the answer is simple, and it reveals the most fundamental difference between GCSES and A Levels. And it’s this: A Level students need to do more than just the homework that their teachers set them at home if they really want to get good results. This means making going through key texts at your own initiative; making notes without having been instructed to do so; doing exercises in text books off your own bat.

Less keeping tabs on you from teachers

You might initially question this claim. After all, won’t your teachers be closely monitoring your progress, like they did at GCSE? Well, don’t bank on it, especially if you’re studying your A Levels at a college rather than in school. As a sixteen-year-old you’re considered to be much more grown up than the GCSE version of yourself, and as such it’s down to you and you alone to make sure you put in the work required.

So, in essence, A Levels represent a much weightier challenge than GCSE, the best way to survive them is to be prepared to put in the work you need to do to feel on top of everything rather than just what your teacher tells you to do, and the only person who’ll really be making sure you do this is yourself!

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Key stats to look for in university league tables

As we discussed earlier in the week, university league tables are complicated things. They present you with a mass of data that relates to a very wide range of aspects of what a university does, and then uses it all to give a somewhat black-and-white-seeming ranking of the country’s universities.

And as we hope our earlier explanation made you aware, the final position that a university occupies in the university league tables isn’t the first and last word when it comes to deciding which universities to apply to.

Instead, getting the most out of the university league tables depends on scrutinizing the different scores contained within them more carefully, and understanding what they all really mean and which ones are most important to you.

In our last blog post we suggested that you pay at the very least as much attention to the teaching quality score in the university league tables as the research quality score, which plays a key role in determining the overall positions but doesn’t measure something that will necessarily be of benefit to you as an undergraduate. And we also suggested that subject tables be taken into account as much, and probably even more so, than the overall university league tables.

But these aren’t the only things you need to know about university league tables. They also contain scores in lots of other categories, some of which are important and some of which are less so. To help you find the information from the university league tables that’ll be most useful to you, we’d suggest you pay particular attention to these three headings:

Staff-student ratio

This measurement is really important, as it gives you a good idea of how much direct interaction you will have with your department’s academic staff. If there are only a couple of lecturers for teaching hundreds of students, not only will it mean that much of your teaching will involve you passively taking notes rather than debating with experts and fellow students in small-group seminars, but you’ll also find it difficult to speak to someone if you’re having problems with an aspect of the course or if you want more detailed feedback on your coursework.

National Student Survery scores

We really like this one because it’s one of the few components of university league tables that is based around the perspectives of students who have progressed through the university. The NSS involves a very detailed series of questions across a wide range of categories, and it is also completed every year by thousands of students. All this means it helps build up a picture of what students really think about the course and the university you are interested in.

Careers destinations

Most university league tables contain a score based around what proportion of graduates from the university have found a graduate-level job or gone on to further studies within six months of graduating. While it’s important to qualify the significance of this figure–how you do after university will primarily be about your own aspirations and ambition–if you see a university that scores highly in this category it suggests that employers are clearly impressed with students that come from that institution, and as such it can serve as something of a gauge of employers’ perceptions of the university.

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Making sense of university league tables

Although the new school term hasn’t even started yet, if there’s one thing you can be sure about at this time of year it’s that many students who’ve just left Year 12 won’t have their minds on beginning their final year of secondary school. Instead, they’ll be looking towards the next step of their education, namely university. By this point in the summer almost all of those planning on going to university the academic year after next have at the very least started giving serious consideration to the course they’ll do or where they’ll apply to. And one of the key things they’ll use to help them make their choice is university league tables.

University league tables have been a prominent feature of the university landscape for some time now. Universities who climb the league tables will loudly trumpet their success, while individual departments will refer to bits of their university league tables scores–whether it be research or teaching excellence or career prospects of their graduates–in their attempts to sell themselves to prospective students.

But when you look at university league tables, what you end up being confronted with is a load of numbers. And while the people that make the league tables are kind enough to label each column, as someone who’s never been to university before you’ll be forgiven for not fully knowing the significance of them all.

While the overall position that a university occupies in the university league tables is important, it’s at least every bit as important to understand what the numbers that make up the overall positions mean for you, and how you should weigh them up against each other. So to help you get started in putting the university league tables to work for you, here are three important sets of scores within them that are worth examining a bit further.

Teaching quality and research quality

The first of these categories is fairly self-explanatory; the second essentially means how much significance is attached to the ideas, arguments and discoveries that the academic staff of the university in question come up with, whether it be breakthroughs in understanding cancer or shedding new light on Viking culture.

Now, one thing it’s important for you to understand as a prospective undergraduate is that a lot of importance is often attached to research quality in university league tables–and therefore which universities are considered ‘good’ or ‘the best’–but that this research quality doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality of teaching you receive by those same people who create this excellent research will be any good.

So, don’t be put off by a university coming lower than you’d expect in the university league tables; it could just be that it’s not a research-focused university, and as a result loses points in what is a key category for league table purposes even though this low score is not necessarily something that would make much difference to the quality of the education you’d receive there.

Subject tables and overall tables

Another area that causes confusion amongst students is the fact that there are both overall university league tables and university league tables that compare a given subject across all the UK’s universities. People who scrutinize both sets of tables will often notice that it’s perfectly possible for a university to top a subject table but be low down the overall university league tables.

So which should you prioritize? Well, like with the teaching and research quality scores, it’s important to consider which is of greater practical relevance to you. If you go to a university that’s in the top five overall but towards the bottom of the table for the subject you want to study, the amazing quality of the other departments it has will be little comfort to you once you’re there if the teaching you receive is poor. So the subject tables are unquestionably important.

Of course, it can’t be denied that our society’s overall perception of which universities are the ‘best’ ones corresponds more to the overall league-table positions they occupy than a more detailed and nuanced consideration of which universities are best for which subjects. Nevertheless, for the purposes of what you’ll get out of your degree the subject tables are a very important piece of guidance, while the overall university league tables won’t be able to tell you too much about whether a given university is the right one for you.

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Should I do the pre-course preparation work that my uni has sent me?

Assuming you got the grades you needed, or alternatively managed to get a place through clearing, clearing the hurdle of A Level results last week will probably now mean your thoughts are fully on starting university in the next month or so. Yep, you’ll already be looking eagerly at what fresher’s week options there are and what societies you can join; and perhaps you’ll also be getting to know a few of your fellow freshers through Facebook.

But in among all the exciting flyers for freshers’ week and important-looking info on registration that your university will have mailed to your home, there may also have been some pre-course preparation stuff prepared by your department.

You may have looked at it and, after a long and blissful summer of relaxing, decided to turn a blind eye to it. After all, surely everyone else will be doing the same thing? And won’t there be plenty of time for studying once term starts.

Well, without wanting to play the role of the nagging, nerdy side of your conscience, we’d humbly suggest that there may in fact be some merit in getting stuck into the pre-course preparation materials you’ve been sent.

Our attempt to sell you this is not based around the very obvious argument that it will enhance your performance on your first year of your course, allowing you to breeze through it while others struggle to grapple with the complexities of what’s thrown at them. Oh no. Our argument to put some effort into the pre-course preparation is the implication of what that enhanced performance will mean: that you’ll have more free time to enjoy the social side of university and all the great extracurricular experiences it has to offer.

Imagine it: instead of spending hours in the evenings grappling with essay questions you don’t understand, you’ll be out making new friends and sampling the very best of student life.

Essentially, if we were you we’d see that pre-course preparation as time spent doing work now that you won’t have to do once you actually start university, a time when the temptations not to study will be far greater than they are in this final month of living at home with your parents in the town where you grew up.

So pick up that pre-course preparation pack now and get reading!

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