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A Level exam results day etiquette

We’re now at a point where we’re fewer than two weeks away from A Level exam results day. While you’ll have probably experienced that nervy morning of heading into school to pick up results from when you did GCSEs a couple of years ago, you’ll find that the rules of the game are a little different this time.

You see, if you’re planning on going to university, when you pick up A Level exam results the stakes are quite a lot higher than for GCSEs. Those grades are much more than letters: they’re your ticket to the student years of your life.

The importance of the day means that it can be difficult to know how to approach it. What do you to hide your nerves? How do you react if you get the grades you wanted? Or, more to the point, how should you react if you don’t?

In fact, there’s really a set of unwritten rules about etiquette for picking up A Level exam results. Unfortunately not everyone is aware of those rules, but it’s worthwhile to know them, not just so that you don’t cause bother other people who are also collecting theirs, but also so you will be prepared if something unexpected happens.

These, in our view, are the most important bits of A Level exam results day etiquette.

1) Don’t go in feeling worse for wear

Unlike when you got GCSE results, when you are about to receive your A Level exam results you’ll most likely already have turned eighteen. There is therefore a big tradition for students to go out and celebrate the day before they get their A Level exam results (as well, of course, as heading out for a bigger party once you’ve got the results envelope!).

While there’s no problem with this, it’s definitely a good idea not to overdo things on the Wednesday night. This is not just because bad news (not that we expect you’ll be getting any!) is harder to take when you’re not feeling tip-top, but you’ll also be less capable of launching yourself into the practicalities of clearing, should you need to.

2) Go somewhere private if you want to

Some people are happy to open that envelope containing their A Level exam results in front of dozens of people. But some people aren’t, and if you fall into this last category there’s absolutely no need for you to open the envelope in front of an audience if you don’t want to. Take yourself off to a quiet room or corner, and open it there.

3) Respect other people’s space and feelings

We sincerely hope that you get the A Level exam results you were expecting (assuming your expectations were to do well!), but if it does all go according to plan, don’t forget that this won’t be the case for everyone at your school or college. And there’s nothing worse than getting grades that don’t get you your place at uni when people around you are wildly and loudly exciting. So don’t rub your success in people’s noses.

4) See the bigger picture

Perhaps the most important tip of all, this one is also the most difficult to stick to. It might not seem like it now, but A Level exam results are not the most important thing that will happen in your life, and nor are they some sort of winner-takes-all spin of the wheel that will determine your whole future in one dramatic moment. If things don’t go quite right, you’ll have another chance to put things right. And if you can keep that at the front of your mind, the day shouldn’t be so stressful, whatever happens.

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Essential technology for students

One very common question for people who are due to start university after the summer is over is: Is there going to be any way I’ll be able to avoid having to have lectures earlier that about 1pm? That, however, is the sort of question that we do not answer here, as we’re cut from the cloth of those irritating people who always relished a 9am tutorial.

But another question that people ask themselves–and this is one that we’re more than happy to provide an answer to–is: What pieces of technology will I need to make the most of being a student? It’s a very good question, and we’re happy you asked it.

We no longer live in an era where the only bits of kit a student needed for academic success were a pen and a notepad, with gadgets and electronics now enriching our educational experience in many different ways. The only downside to all this is that technology can often be very pricey. You don’t want to find that you’ve shelled out hundreds of pounds for something that has little practical value, and nor do you want to find yourself without something that you really did need as a result of having blown your budget on said useless item.

So, we thought we’d take a look at some of the key things that students consider taking to university, grouping them in three categories: essentials, worthwhile optionals, and extravagances.

The essentials: laptop (£300-£400) and black-and-white laser printer (£40-£60)

Very often students are wowed by the boasts featuring in the prospectus of the university they’re heading to about “state-of-the art computer rooms” or some such. And while many universities do have lots of shiny computers, the reality is that when it comes to essay submission or exam time, there is never, ever enough of them to go round. So do not under any circumstances be fooled into thinking that you won’t need to take a computer to university with you.

While desktop computers are will give you a machine of your own for doing work, a laptop is definitely preferable, mainly for the convenience of being able to take it to the library or a study zone. You’ll be glad you did when your neighbour in halls is playing dubstep at full volume while you’re trying to write an essay.

You won’t need anything flashy, hence the lowish price we’ve quoted here. If the argument that it’s an educational investment worth making hasn’t convinced you, then think also of it like this: a laptop also serves very nicely as a multimedia device, saving you money on a TV and a hi-fi. In fact, if you restrict yourself to iplayer and DVDs for your viewing enjoyment you won’t even have to splash out on a TV licence, which’ll save you a hundred quid or so over the course of the academic year.

A printer is essential for more or less the same reason that relying on university computer rooms is frustrating: you just won’t find yourself able to get easy access to one when you need it the most. Printers are cheap as chips nowadays, though if at all possible get a black-and-white laser one rather than an inkjet one, as you’ll get a lot more pages printed for your money than you will with an inkjet.

Next time we’ll have a look at the worthwhile optionals, but in the meantime do a bit of tentative online window shopping for a shiny new laptop!

Posted in university | Tagged , , , |

We’ve got everything you need to get you through clearing!

With A-Level results now less than a month away, students are gearing up for the big day when they get their final exam results. But in most cases, they’re not interested in the grades for the sake of knowing how smart they are. No, to an eighteen-year-old A-Level results mean only one thing: Will I get that place at university that I’m after? If the answer to that question unfortunately turns out to be no, or they have held off applying for any courses until they get their results, 15th August that last question will change to this one: how can I get a place through clearing?

Well, to put your mind at rest, the answer to that question will probably be yes. Every year there are loads of great courses available through clearing, with thousands of students coming out the other side of the process every year feeling just as happy as those who got the grades that allowed them to take up the conditional offers they’d been made.

But make no mistake: if you go into clearing, you need your wits about you. You need to keep a cool head and, above all, have all the right information at your fingertips.

That’s why we’ve put together a dedicated clearing section on our website, which gathers together all in one place the things you’ll need to make informed choices during clearing. Here are some of the highlights of what you’ll be able to make use of from either right now–if you know that you’ll be using clearing–or from August 15th–if it turns out you didn’t get the results you expected.

University profiles

One of the most important mistakes to avoid with clearing is to just take the first course offer that comes your way. Going to university is just as much about the overall social and community experience and being in an atmosphere that suits your personality. This is where our university guides can help you. They offer an insight into the pros and cons of each university in the UK, helping you to make an informed choice.

Clearing contacts

Unlike the first stage of the UCAS cycle, going through clearing means dealing directly with admissions officers and lecturers. So you need to know who to speak to and how to get hold of them. Our clearing contacts section contains a huge database of the phone numbers of all the main universities in the UK. Think of them as your hotline to a university place.

Guides to clearing and adjustment

Clearing involves a lot of decision making. And to make decisions wisely, you need to be informed. We’ve got a great selection of articles and guides that will give you a crystal-clear idea of the things you need to consider when going through clearing, as well as step-by-step instructions so that you can navigate yourself to the endpoint of a firm offer.

Guides to Gap Years

Of course, the clearing process doesn’t always end in a university place for everyone. It’s therefore quite a good idea to have a contingency plan of what you’d do for the next year, should it turn out that you won’t be heading off to university. To that end, we’ve also got some great resources for helping you to plan an amazing gap-year experience.

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More suggestions for keeping hold of your travel memories

As you may have guessed from the blog post we put up a few days ago about travelling memories, we’re big fans of taking the time to capture the magic of your weeks or months away. Last time we discussed the art of taking a good photograph that will help you remember the good times rather than spending your time attempting to take the sort of pics that appear on postcards or in travel brochures (ie., all places and no personality).

But getting your photos right is by far from the only thing you can do to capture your travelling experience for posterity. In fact, no matter how good your photos are the chances are that without some other record the experiences that go with the pictures will become increasingly hazy over time. To keep your memories as vivid as when they happened, you’re going to need to get writing.

Writing about your travel experience

Now, you may be thinking that writing about your travels while they’re on them is either a waste of time or something you’d feel awkward about. But neither of these things has to be true. The trick is to find a writing format that you’re comfortable with, both in terms of the time that you put into it and who your audience is.

The more extroverted among you and those who maybe harbour ambitions of one day writing professionally will immediately be drawn to keeping a blog. These folks love the challenge of broadcasting to friends, family and even strangers what is so great about what they’re doing, and trying to put a unique and personalized spin on everything. But they may not realise that in doing this they’re not just creating something for the present, but also a great collection of vivid memories that they can keep forever.

A travel blog doesn’t just have to be for the outgoing, either. You can restrict access to your blog so that as many or as few people as you like can see it. And while you may self-consciously think that no one is interested in what you’re up to, the fact is that your family and close friends would love a way of finding out what you’re up to, especially if what you’re writing puts everything across from a perspective that is authentically yours.

Blogging is far from the only option for writing down your travel memories, however. For those who like the idea of a bit more privacy, there’s nothing stopping you from keeping a diary, whether in hard copy or in a private online journal. Knowing that it’s only you who’s going to read your words will allow you to be completely honest about everything you see, do and feel, meaning that this form of memory collecting will probably provide you in the future with a much more intimate representation of what your travels were like.

The final writing suggestion we’d make is something that you’ll probably end up doing while you’re away anyway, namely writing emails to friends and family about what you’re up to. Now, you might see these emails as things that disappear into the ether when you hit the send button, but by the magic of your Sent folder they’ll in fact be accessible to you forever. So make sure you fill your missives to your loved ones with lots of anecdotes told with warmth and humour, as in doing so you’ll also be writing something that you’ll be able to read years from now that reminds you of those fun travelling times.

Posted in Gap years | Tagged , , |

What other jobs can you do in the aviation sector?

Earlier this week we took you through the steps required to be able to work as a pilot on a commercial passenger line. As we saw, it’s a pretty gruelling path to qualification, requiring thousands of hours in the cockpit and in the classroom, not to mention tens of thousands of pounds in tuition fees.

What we didn’t have space to tell you in that blog post, however, was that there are also loads of other great careers in the airline sector. So if you have always been amazed by air travel but for whatever reason don’t quite see yourself in a captain’s uniform, why not consider trying a career in one of these fields?

Air-traffic control

If you’re good at shouldering enormous, life-and-death levels of responsibility and have supreme levels of accuracy and concentration, then working in air-traffic control would be one of the best ways to make use of–and receive financial reward for–those talents.

Simply summarising the job of an air-traffic controller in a sentence makes the work seem simple: they make sure aeroplanes coming into and going out of an airport or on a flight path are where they should be at the right time. But since all they have to do this are some computer instruments and radio contact with pilots, and since the consequences of them getting things wrong are potentially a crash between two planes and many fatalities, it’s easy to see why this isn’t a job for the faint hearted.

And this is precisely why air-traffic controllers receive the very high salaries that they do. And it’s also why they undergo a rigorous programme of training that is very difficult to get into. Entry to the profession is through being accepted to the College of Air Traffic Control, who put their applicants through several different, highly demanding assessment stages that test all sorts of cognitive, behavioural and physical areas.

Flight Attendant

Working as a flight attendant is definitely a career choice worth considering if your strengths lie in your people skills. While most of the people in the customer-service world are stuck in shops or call centres, you’re travelling all around the world for free, being put up in hotels by your employer.

However, this certainly isn’t a job for those who want a means to the end of travelling. Not only do flight attendants get the heave-ho by their employer if they fail to uphold very high standards of customer service or fail to act in compliance with the procedures they’re told to follow, but they also have to be able to act calmly in a crisis and take safety procedures incredibly seriously.

Although there are different sorts of academies that offer training programmes for flight attendants, the majority of airlines operate their own training schemes, entry for which doesn’t require a qualification from these aforementioned academies. Experience working with customers would certainly increase your chances of being accepted to an airline’s flight-attendant intake, however.

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Making sure you remember your travel adventures

Although in an ideal world we’d all be off on a gap year for the full twelve months of the year, every year, the reality is that opportunities for travelling are in practice few and far between. And even when we do get the chance to head abroad to see the sights and meet new people, most of us don’t actually go for a full gap-year sized trip. For every person who spends a whole or most of a gap year travelling, there are probably at least half a dozen people whose lifetime travel experiences (not counting your standard holidays) will amount to between one and a handful of trips of no more than a couple of months’ duration.

There’s one clear implication to this: those magical memories you’ll generate off the back of your awesome experiences abroad will be in short supply. So you’d better not let them slip away.

This, unfortunately, is something that all too many people do. They want to hold onto that freedom and fun that they felt, but they’ve got nothing physical that really helps keep those memories alive. It’s only a couple of years down the line that they discover that collecting and curating your travel memories requires an effort that goes beyond adding a bunch of people you’ll never see again on Facebook and taking some snaps with your phone’s camera.

So if you’re about to head away for some summer travelling, or will be beginning a gap year later in the year, try this tip to make sure that when you’re stuck in an office on a rainy day ten years from now it’ll be easier to remember what’s going to be some very special moments in your life.

Take photos with people in, not just places and things

Although digital photography is beyond any shadow of a doubt a Good Thing, it does have a couple of downsides. And foremost among them is this: it makes everyone think they’re a naturally gifted professional photographer in the making. And this leads them to spending inordinately long periods of time and an inordinately large amount of memory-card space attempting to take artsy shots of market-stall owners and their wares, or reflections of sunsets on a lake, or the twinkling lights of a night-time city skyline.

We’re not saying that you shouldn’t take any photos like this–go ahead, fill your boots–but what you’ll almost certainly find when you look back at such photos in a few years’ time (if you bother to do so at all) is that a) they look like lots of other photos you’ve seen elsewhere; and b) they don’t capture your fond memories at all.

There’s a simple reason for this: they don’t contain the faces of the people you befriended and bonded with while you were away. These are the people you need to keep in your photos. By this we don’t mean just stick to shots of crazy nights out; we mean put the bulk of your creative photographic endeavours into capturing the essence of why making friends while travelling is one of the most uplifting things a person can do.

Posted in Gap years | Tagged , |

How do you become an airline pilot?

Ask kids what they want to do when they grow up, and once you weed out the “celebrity” careers like Premiership footballer or pop star, and all the (sadly) unfeasible careers like pirate or ninja, you’ll quite probably find that the top answer you get will be pilot.

And who hasn’t at some point idly thought about how fantastic it would be to have a job where you spend your time flying around the world, experiencing the thrill of being in control of an enormous jet as you do so? The thing is, for many of us these thoughts that are dismissed at one point or another by a belief that it’d all be an impossible dream.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. While it’s by no means the easiest line of work to get into, there are opportunities for those who have got the dedication and perseverance to don the uniform of a pilot and take control of a commercial airliner. Like most other careers, becoming a pilot simply requires you to follow the training and experience pathway that all people in the profession must follow, and so if you break that journey down into phases it seems a whole lot easier.

Let’s start with the educational side of things. You don’t need to have a degree to become a commercial pilot, although some higher-education institutions offer diplomas or degrees in aviation-related studies, which are designed to give people specialist expertise in the overall industry rather than specifically as training to be a commercial pilot.

However, even though you don’t have to have a degree, what you certainly will need is a good understanding of mathematics and physics, the two disciplines that are essential for understanding the science of flight and therefore play a fundamentally important part in the process of pilot training. So make sure you keep paying attention in school!

The golden ticket to working as a pilot for a commercial airline is something called an Airline Transport Pilot Licence (ATPL). It’s only with this that you are allowed to take command of a plane operating airlines’ scheduled flights. However, you don’t just start qualifying from scratch for the ATPL. Before then you need to get at least a couple of other pilot’s licences first. The first of these is a private pilot’s licence. This is the entry-level licence, and working towards qualifying for it will let you gain the basics of flying, with your practice taking place in small aircraft. After this comes a commercial pilot’s licence, which constitutes a big step up in terms of the complexity of the planes you’ll fly and your knowledge of crucially important areas such as meteorology and aviation law.

Only after you have the commercial pilot’s licence can you progress on to the ATPL, and even getting to this stage involves hundreds of hours of flight time and dozens of exams. In other words, this isn’t a career that you casually go into.

Training for these licences is also very expensive, with it potentially costing close to £100,000 pounds to complete the training required for the ATPL. It’s for this reason that many people complete this licence on a part-time basis, preferably using their commercial pilot licence as employment to help fund their training.

If we add on top of this the fact that after a while the working routine of continually being away from your family and continually existing on a very unsettled body clock can become draining after a while, then it’s easy that there are downsides to following this career path. That said, if your love of the idea of this type of work hasn’t been dampened by these challenges, then you’ve got nothing left to do other than book your first flying lesson!

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What does working in the public sector mean?

If you keep an eye on the news, you’ll have noticed that a relatively frequent theme for stories is battles between public sector workers and the government. Generally these stories involve certain groups of public sector workers facing reductions in their pensions or other benefits, or alternatively there being the prospect of cutbacks and redundancies. And these disagreements often seem to lead to another type of story, namely strikes by public sector workers.

All of this angst and aggro tends to obscure what it is that public sector workers actually do. And for young people who are trying to make decisions about their future this can only be bad news. Knowing the full facts of as many different career options as possible is one of the most important ways to make informed choices about your future, and if all people think of when they hear the term “public sector worker” is confrontation, they’ll be less likely to look further into what this line of work involves.

So let’s take a moment to demystify the term “public sector worker.” You might have difficulty visualizing what people who fall into this category do, but in fact according to the broadest definition of the term these people have probably had a bigger role to play in your life than anyone else, with the obvious exception of your family. Because “public sector workers” is in fact the umbrella term we use for anyone who works for an organization run by some level of government, whether that’s your local council or the national government. This means all the staff at your local state schools–including your teachers–and all the people who work in your nearest hospital or GP clinic–including the nurses and doctors–are public sector workers.

But while you obviously know exactly what a doctor, a nurse or a teacher is, these roles only amount to a small proportion of the total number of public sector workers. And even if we include all the other more easily identifiable job roles in the sector–social workers, binmen, librarians, and many others besides–we still won’t have accounted for all of the public sector workers.

This is because much of the work carried out by your local council and national government revolves around office-based work that the public doesn’t see, with the job titles of the people doing it not typically falling into the categories of the most well-known career paths. But for every public sector worker providing a frontline service to the public, there are probably a couple more who are working behind the scenes, doing things like formulating strategies to improve services, doing the administration that makes sure everyone gets paid on time, keeping an eye on budgets or reviewing plans for new building projects.

As you can see, these four behind-the-scenes examples cover a very wide range of activities. And all of them are also things that people do in the private sector (by which we mean companies and businesses). This means that if your thoughts about your career so far have led you to thinking about working within a specific industry–for example, marketing, finance or law–then it’s more than likely that there are opportunities within the public sector part of those industries for you.

So how do you decide whether to try and live out your career ambitions within the public or private sector? This is a quandary that many people find themselves in at some point in their career. And, in fact, there are plenty of people who spend part of their career in the private sector, and part in the public sector.

It’s difficult to generalize about how people decide what is right for them–it depends a lot on the type of job you do–but there are a couple of themes that seem to be common to most areas of work. Whereas in the private sector you can potentially be paid a lot more (budgets are generally more limited within the public sector, and this tends to mean salaries are lower) the attractions of the public sector are twofold.

First, people who work in the public sector tend to cite the feeling of job satisfaction they get from knowing that the organization they work in exists to help the public, rather than operating more according to the principles of profit making. And second, traditionally public sector workers have had a better deal in terms of things like the pension plan they are offered and the number of days of leave they are entitled to. That said, these things are now the subject of review and are becoming less common, bringing us back to the arguments and strikes that we see in the news today!

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How to qualify as a lawyer

The big talking point from last night’s TV was definitely The Murder Trial on Channel 4. This groundbreaking show provided unprecedented access to the workings of a real-life court case. Many commentators noted that one of the most significant things about the show was that it would shatter people’s preconceptions about what a lawyer does and the style in which he or she does it.

Now, while the consensus among the TV reviewers seems to be that the upshot of all this will be that people will now see the job of a lawyer as being much more boring than their favourite shows had led them to believe. We, however, would beg to differ, especially with regards to young people.

The way we see it, most people already knew full well that TV lawyers don’t parade around the court as though they were treading the boards for the Royal Shakespeare Company. What the show will have made them more aware of, however, is just what incredibly important work lawyers do, and just how challenging this work is.

Challenging and important are usually two adjectives that inspire people to want to follow a particular career. And so we think that last night there were probably more young people heading off to bed entertaining the notion of one day being a lawyer than there had been the day before.

But how exactly do you become a lawyer? Well, there are two main paths you can take. You’ll notice as you read them that neither involve studying law at A Level. This is because the truth is that not doing so will not affect your chances of becoming a lawyer at all. So don’t worry if your school or college doesn’t offer this subject at A-Level; both of the training options will still be fully open to you.

Option One: Complete an undergraduate degree in Law after finishing A Levels

This is the most well-known of the paths to qualifying as a lawyer. Over the course of three years (or two in the case of certain universities) you’ll gain a thorough grounding in not just various areas of law, but also the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of it–why we need legal systems, what we really mean when we use terms such as justice, and so forth. Places on law degrees are usually in short supply, and so showing the admissions people you’ve got the brains and the motivation to cut it is essential. Typically this’ll take the form of some work experience and observation of legal practice, and good grades, including in an essay-based subject.

After you graduate, you’ll then head off to complete a one-year Legal Practice Course. These are expensive, though if you’ve secured a training contract with a law firm they’ll probably pay the costs of it for you.

Option Two: Complete an undergraduate course in another subject and then progress to postgraduate studies in Law

In the UK it’s not necessary to complete an undergraduate degree in Law to be able to walk along this career path. Instead, you can get a degree in any subject you want, and then complete either an accelerate LLB or a one-year diploma. Both of these options involve more intensive studying than doing an undergraduate LLB–you’re basically cramming in the same material in a shorter space of time–but as graduates the people who take these courses are more experienced and mature than those fresh out of school, and are therefore better equipped to cope with this challenge. Many people choose this route because while their long-term goal is to become a lawyer, they also want to enjoy the challenge of studying another subject in which they have strong intellectual interests.

Once you’ve completed this postgraduate training you simply follow the same steps as the undergraduate law students, namely completing an LPC.

A Level Law is purely optional

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Thinking of studying abroad?

Are you thinking about which university is right for you? Does a period spent living abroad interest you? If so, consider that many universities offer a sandwich year – a year spent either working in an industry related to your degree or studying at a foreign university. In most cases it means extending your time as an undergraduate, but the benefits should outweigh the extra time spent in education.

If you’re looking to study a foreign language, then it’s a given that you will be spending some time in a country that speaks your chosen language – possibly two if you decide on a joint honours degree. It doesn’t have to be the closest country either, although you might want that; the adventurous could find themselves studying Spanish in Colombia or in French speaking Canada practicing their pronunciation.

Other disciplines are less obvious but some universities offer placements in the USA as well as closer to home. If you’re interested, look at the course description and make a point to ask about it at open days.

There are a few things to consider when thinking about taking a year in industry of studying abroad – if you rush in, you won’t get the full benefit. These three points should get you thinking, but it’s not a definitive list.

1. Cost.

Depending on where you go, various grants are available and you should still get your student loan BUT, setting up in a new place does cost money as do visas and travel to and from (as well as around – you’ll want to explore!) your destination. If you work part time now and want to continue abroad it might be harder for you to find a part-time job to substitute it and you need to think about this potentially lower income.

2. Your goals.

Yes, Barcelona is a fantastic city with a huge party life – but are you looking to learn the language or learn the pricings of each bar? Every university has a student scene that will make you feel welcome and put on events and student nights, would it be better to find somewhere that has a lower number of English speakers, to make sure you test your language skills?

3. Your expectations.

Culture shock can affect everyone differently, if you know more about what to expect then you’ll be prepared if and when it kicks in. Getting over it can be as simple as having a long awaited cup of tea or it could be a case of making a new friend.

From the comfort of your sofa, the experience could seem nerve racking and terrifying or you might already be champing at the bit. Just remember that you won’t be alone and that you really do get out what you put in. A little bit of preparation can go a long way.

Posted in Uncategorized, university | Tagged , , |
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