Take advantage of the sunshine by heading to an open day!
The sun is finally out, meaning it’s a great time to get out into the world and see it in all its beauty. But the good weather isn’t just a prompt for you to head out to the park, the countryside or the beach; it’s also Mother Nature’s way of telling you that you should go and visit a few university or college open days, to help you decide either where to apply to or where to accept an offer from for the coming autumn.
You see, the beautiful weather really brings out the best in universities or colleges and their students. After weeks and weeks of hard slog and essays, students enter the final stages of the year. And while for some–in particular the final-year students–this means many hours of cramming, very often for others it’s actually quite a relaxed time, with the exam prep being less intense than the many coursework deadlines they had to contend with earlier in the year. And once those final-year students have finished their exams a bit later in the summer, you can guarantee you’ll see them on campus, luxuriating in the final sunny days of their student experience.
All this means that the good weather gives you a sense of the true potential that the universities that you’re interested in terms of their social scene and atmosphere. A campus thronging with happy students congregating suggests a uni where people easily make circles of friends; empty green spaces and student-union beer gardens will suggest it lacks a real social focus.
These are all things you can gauge by booking yourself a spot on a spring- or summertime open day. And we’re not ashamed to say that leavingschool.co.uk is the place to look to find your open-day opportunities, thanks to the great open-day section of the website we’ve been putting together over the last few months.
The open-day section is quite possibly the web’s most comprehensive and best-organized collection of UK open days on the web. We’ve put together an exhaustive calendar of open days, meaning you can see exactly which different institutions you can visit over the next few months.
But it gets better. Click on a specific open day and not only will you get a full range of the key details (date, place, time, etc.) but also a direct link to the college or university’s open-day site, through which you can book your place at the open day.
Finding out about and booking a place on an open day has never been easier. So what are you waiting for? Get over to our open-day section now, have a browse and take advantage of the sunshine to go and see where you can next be studying in its full glory!
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged open day, college, university, summer, students
A couple of great productivity tools for revision
Revision, revision revision…. It seems like nowadays all everyone is talking about it revision. Whether it’s teachers leaning on you to get your act together and start it as soon as possible, or parents quizzing you on when you’re going to get started, revision is something that people just won’t let you get away from. And it’ll only get worse until exams are over in June. You may well find, though, that although you often try to actually get down to the job of doing some solid revision, your mind ultimately starts to wander. You let yourself get distracted, or can’t force yourself to sit down for any long period of time. Although this is something that can affect people right throughout their revision period, it tends to happen the most when they’re in the earliest stages of it. This is largely because, with big exams still a couple of months away, there’s less of a shadow hanging over you and less of a feeling of pressure. Unfortunately, though, if you don’t actually do revision in these early stages you’ll feel under an overwhelming amount of pressure if you reach a point when, just a couple of weeks before exams, you haven’t really done any at all. Short of tricking yourself into thinking that there’s an extreme pressure to get started with revision right now, how can you gently cajole yourself into starting your revision early, so you don’t have to cram hours and hours of it in just before exam time? Productivity tools, that’s how. There are all sorts of interesting sites and apps out there that can help you focus on the revision task at hand and ensure you get some good work done. Here are a couple of our faves: Mytomatoes.com This site is great if you simply struggle to focus when you’re doing revision, so you end up sitting there for hours without really getting anything done. The way the site works is it encourages you to divide up your time into focused twenty-five-minute bursts of activity, which are interspersed with 5 minute breaks (though you can take a longer break if so desired). It gets you to stick to this rhythm by way of a countdown timer which–this is the clever part–once it has run down is replaced by a field in which you have to briefly write down what you did. This process of writing down what you’ve done makes you more aware of how well you’re concentrating, and over time you can build up a record of how much revision you’ve done for the day, week or month. Cold Turkey (http://getcoldturkey.com/) This clever little programme is a must if you do revision on the computer and find yourself struggling to stop yourself looking at websites and playing games instead of revising. It allows you to block internet access from your computer (or just certain websites) or to other applications for a set period of time. And once it’s running, it’s very difficult to override the timer! You’ll soon find it’s amazing how much you can get accomplished without the internet (except for leavingschool.co.uk, of course!).
Tagged studying, revising, revision, productivity
A level revision
A Level: Calling all students!
Are you looking for a proficient, multi-faceted revision site that can aid you in your struggles with Revision?
Of course you are. Getting in has formulated a fantastic, informative Revision Site in conjunction with those that know best, the academics, to bring you salvation as you wade through the mess that is your notes from the past year.
During Sixth Form, students can become overwhelmed with all of the different paths that seem to be opening up in front of them and not knowing which one to choose. It is through this period of change that the significance of A Levels can sometimes feel like a minor issue and it is easy to lose sight of what is truly in front of you. However, for those of you considering Higher Education, achieving good A Levels is the best thing you can actively determine to put yourself in the best possible position to choose your desired institution.
This is where Getting in comes in. With free, direct revision pages that are tailored to meet the student’s most fundamental needs, it is a site that can boost your confidence when the time comes to face your exams.
The website currently provides revision pages on the following subjects:
Biology, covering the topics: Skeletal Muscles, Biology and Disease, Control in Cells and Organisms, Populations and Environment, The Variety of Living Organisms, Homeostasis, Stimuli and Response, The Digestive System, The Heart, The Lungs, Blood’s Defence System, Investigative and Practical Skills.
History, covering the topics: An Introduction, Appeasement, Britain 1783 – 1850, Revolutionary France, France 1815-1875, Mussolini’s Italy, Republic Civil War, Spain and The Spanish Empire, Stalinism, The Nazis.
English, covering the topics: Aspects of Narrative, Great Expectations, Language Form and Structure, Making Links to Other Texts, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, Poetry – Robert Browning, Terminology and Concepts, Texts and Genres, The Rime of The Ancient Mariner.
Chemistry, Covering the topics: Periodicity, Petroleum and Alkanes, Amounts of Substance, Bonding, Organic Chemistry, Alcohols, Alkenes, Analytical Techniques, Energetics, Equilibria, Extraction of Metals, Group 2 The Alkali Earth Metals, Group 7 The Halogens, Haloakanes, Acids and Bases, Kinetics, Nomenclature and Isomerism, Carbonyl Group, Aromatic Chemistry, Amines, Amino Acids, Polymers, Organic Synthesis and Analysis, Structure Determination, Atomic Structure.
Physics, covering the topics: Investigative and Practical Skills, Mechanics, Materials and Waves, Circuits and Electricity, Electromagnetic Radiation, Particles and Radiation.
Business Studies, covering the topics: Managing a Business, People Management, Finance, Competitive Environment, Operations Management, People in Business.
Tagged revision
The two main types of #volunteering #work
In our last blog post we had a look at the different places you can visit to find out about volunteering opportunities where you live. Today we’re going to take a slightly different approach to the same overall question of how you can get involved with volunteering. Instead of looking at the places where you can find who’d like your help, we’ll be looking at the different types of volunteering you could do.
There’s a good reason for looking at volunteering from these two angles. While the sources of vacancies can help people find out where they’d be welcome to volunteer where previously they thought there weren’t many where they lived, once they find the opportunities they usually end up having the opposite problem to the one they started out with: there are now too many to choose from!
This is where looking at different types of volunteering comes into its own. While you definitely can choose who you volunteer with based on how much their cause appeals to you–a strategy we wholeheartedly recommend–you can also let your decision be guided in part by what type of volunteer work would best suit you, in terms of the skills you could gain from it and how it could help your future study and career plans.
Volunteering, you see, comes in many shapes and sizes, with each different type of position requiring different attributes and qualities, many of which are needed for life out in the world of work.
The way we see it, there are two main types of volunteering: working directly with the people the charity helps; and fundraising work. Let’s have a look at what they involve, and what skills they could help you develop.
Working with people (and maybe dogs and cats, too)
This is probably the sort of charity work that is conjured up in most people’s minds when they think of volunteering. It’s volunteering in its purest form of working directly with people who’ll benefit from your help.
Virtually all charities have volunteering options of this sort. Whether it’s spending time with the elderly in a residence, playing with kids at a youth centre or walking dogs from the shelter, there are thousands of opportunities to get stuck in like this.
And you get all sorts of great skills from this type of work, some of which are generic, and some of which are particularly applicable to certain career paths. The broad skills you’ll get are teamwork, communicating, initiative and following instructions. If you’re interested in working in a field of healthcare, looking after the sick or infirm will help you develop caregiving skills. And for certain other professions, such as civil engineering, there are also sometimes opportunities to be had in areas such as construction projects in developing countries.
Fundraising
If charities need people manning the frontline of their services, they also need money to help fund their activities. As a consequence they’re just as eager for people to get involved in helping them raise the cash they need to carry out their noble work.
There are a number of different fundraising positions you can fill. You could get out there amongst the public, soliciting donations from people. You could staff the tills at your local charity shop. Or you could do something a bit more project-oriented, such as be on a fundraising committee at your school or college that organizes fundraising events for a chosen charity. Alternatively, on an individual level you could raise funds through entering an event such as a run or, even more ambitiously, set up your own personal event to attract sponsorship.
Like volunteering to work directly with people, fundraising work will boost your communication and teamworking skills. But it’s also a great choice for people who have designs on working in a leadership role in the future. Fundraising projects require ideas, organizing skills and an ability to meet deadlines under pressure. All things that are perfect for future managers and executives!
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged careers, skills, volunteering, charity work, fundraising
Sources of #volunteering #opportunities
On both a social and personal level, only good things can come out of getting involved in volunteering. People with different kinds of vulnerabilities or challenges, either in your local community or further afield, get some much needed help; and not only do you as an individual get a great feeling of satisfaction from helping others, but you also get something you can use on your CV or university application.
It’s a shame, then, that more young people don’t get involved in volunteering. It’s certainly not through a lack of motivation to either help others or do something to enhance their career prospects. Rather, it’s usually because people who don’t have the direct connections to a charitable initiative don’t know where to begin asking around. Very often it’s the personal connections that get people involved with causes, and without these it can seem sometimes like you’d just have to pick a charity at random.
But would doing that even be such a good thing? The answer is definitely no. There’s very few charities out there that don’t need people, and there’s even fewer that don’t do something that the vast majority of human beings would regard as highly worthwhile.
So, not having any experience of the walks of life that a local charity is involved with shouldn’t be a barrier to getting involved with the great work they do. Or, to put it another way, people with no pets are just as welcome to help out at the RSPCA as people with a living room full of cats!
Still, even knowing that any local charity would welcome your help still doesn’t change the fact that many people still feel a bit self-conscious about pitching up somewhere and offering their assistance. They need an invitation first.
That’s fine; most polite people don’t do things unless invited to do so. Good on you. However, those invitations won’t be sent to you in a gilt-edged envelope. You’ve got to know where to look for them. Here are three places we suggest.
At your school or college
Schools and colleges usually have at least some sort of connection with local charities, whether of a direct or indirect nature. They might have established fundraising relationships with charities–in which case there will be events organized by your school you can get involved with, perhaps even in some sort of organizing capacity–or your school will be involved with schemes such as Duke of Edinburgh, which offer volunteering opportunities.
Community and volunteering centres
Many towns and cities have dedicated centres that serve as the community’s point of contact with local charities. Again, these are a great place to go if you want to find out about volunteering opportunities where you live. Just google ‘volunteering centre’ and the name of your town.
Noticeboards in shops
Although adverts on noticeboards have to an extent been replaced by the Internet, they’re still to be found in many different businesses. Supermarkets usually have them, as do newsagents. They’re prime spots for charities to put up their adverts for volunteers.
Listings websites
Although you should always be very careful about what you sign up for online, there are some websites that are exclusively for charities to advertise volunteering opportunities that they have. www.do-it.org.uk is one great example of this.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged volunteering, careers, ucas applications, voluntary, voluntary experience, CVs
#Careers #ideas: #forensics
Last week on our blog we posted a piece on how TV shows can give people career ambitions that are based on unrealistic portrayals of the job that they’ve decided they want to have. While we mentioned doctors and lawyers as two classic examples of this phenomenon, there is another career which is particularly misrepresented on TV: the forensic scientist. In this case, however, the depiction of the career is so far-fetched that it probably puts more people off it than it inspires. As we’ll see today, this is a real shame, as forensics is a great field for anyone who wants to apply specialist scientific knowledge to real-world situations.
If we are to believe the work of certain police dramas–and, it must be said, those in particular that come from the USA–forensic scientists have mastered every single branch of science under the sun. They can perform autopsies, have an encyclopedic knowledge of every chemical compound known to man, and have limitless access to all sorts of exciting gadgets and doo-dads that help them catch bad guys, some of which clearly don’t exist in real life. And then on top of all that they spend their time actually interrogating, chasing or even shooting suspects. Oh, and let’s not forget their amazing ability to come up with just the right pun or one-liner as they stand over the corpse of another tragically murdered innocent.
This depiction of scientists involved in law enforcement is, put simply, rubbish. But that doesn’t mean, however, that the real forensics teams that help solve crimes don’t do an exciting or worthwhile job. It’s just that, in the real world, any one human being can only reasonably develop one field of scientific expertise, and that becomes the area in which they work. So a geneticist works with DNA, and so on.
All this means that the terms forensics covers a very wide range of job roles, with forensics teams being comprised of a large unit of specialists, rather than a couple of people who know how to do absolutely everything. And they usually leave the actual police work to the police.
The range of specialties involved in forensics means that it’s a field that people can get into from a wide range of subjects. Aside from the roles available to people with degrees from laboratory-based degrees such as genetics or biology, there are also roles for people from a less scientific background.
For example, forensic archaeology is a vital aspect of police forensics work; they apply the skills we commonly associate with things like digging up old coins to methodically process a crime scene, ensuring that no small pieces of evidence are missed. Forensic anthropologists, meanwhile, carry out tasks such as examining long-buried human remains, analyzing them for clues regarding causes and time of death or even identifying a person from small fragments of their remains.
The goal behind all this is to solve instances of wrongdoing and crime, whether they took place yesterday or five hundred years ago. You’ll obviously need to study for a degree related to the branch of forensics you’d like to go into–and quite possibly do postgraduate training after that–but if you like the idea of being able to apply an academic subject that you love to exciting real-life scenarios, this is certainly a career worth thinking about.
The perils of planning a #gapyear
If you’re taking a gap year right now, or are currently on one and are, having spent all of it so far working to save up money, now planning to embark on the adventurous part of the year, you may well be asking yourself the question: Is it going to be what I hoped it would?
It’s a fair question to ask yourself. Your gap year presents a unique opportunity to do something amazing and rewarding. We don’t mean unique in the sense that you’ll never have the chance to go travelling or to live in another country again–these are both things you can do later in life if you so choose–but more because you’ll never have the chance to do these things again in the earliest stages of your adult life, a time when you’re both largely free of responsibilities and have the enthusiasm and energy to dive headfirst into whatever adventures come your way.
However, it is sadly the case that sometimes people’s gap years don’t pan out the way they wanted, and they look back on this period of their life as a missed opportunity. Most of the time, this is down to two related yet opposite mistakes: underplanning and overplanning.
Underplanning
It’s easy to just take a carefree attitude to how the whole gap-year thing will pan out. You’ll go to all sorts of exciting places and do loads of crazy things. It’ll all take care of itself when the time comes to jet off abroad. No worries.
But then, before you know it, September has arrived and you’ve not got round to doing anything. Having not made the effort to decide specifically what you wanted to do, the gap year you vaguely imagined in your head never turned into reality. Granted, this is the most extreme scenario. In reality, most people at least manage to do a month or so of backpacking somewhere. But it still falls far short of what they’d originally dreamt of.
The moral of the story: make plans. And then take the steps to follow through with them. Book the tickets. Contact the volunteering organizations. Get the shots for tropical diseases. You get the idea.
Overplanning
Although underplanning is a peril for the gapista, so too potentially is overplanning. The overplanner doesn’t just get all their tickets booked and so forth well in advance; they also have planned out every last hour of their itinerary. While this process is all well and good for helping you get excited about your trip, it’s almost inevitable that such detailed plans won’t hold up once you’re there, and trying to make them do so will just be an exercise in continually swimming against the tide.
So yes, do plan; but not to the extent that you can’t change plans to go with the flow created by things like the friendships you make while you’re away and new things to see and do that you find out about while you’re away.
Posted in Gap years
Tagged gap years, travelling, year abroad
Can I base my #careers #ideas on #TV?
If there’s one thing that careers advisors and admissions tutors for university courses hate, it’s the following. During the course of either reading a student’s personal statement or interviewing a student, said student puts forward their career or study motivation as being grounded in an inspiration they got from either a TV show or a character from one. The student goes on to explain that the glamorous/dramatic/do-gooder lifestyle that the TV show conveyed about the profession in question made them realise that this was the field of activity they knew they should be dedicating their life to.
If this exchange takes the form of a conversation with a careers advisor, it’s likely that what the student said will be met by the careers advisor with an involuntary grimace or raising of eyebrows, before they then–whether tactfully or otherwise–tell the student to never, ever say such a thing again. Ever. If all this was put forward through a UCAS statement or an interview to an admissions tutor, the response would almost certainly be a rejection.
Yet there’s certain careers where time and time again students confess–or rather say it openly, not realising its a real careers-planning taboo–to having been inspired to study or train for a particular job because of a TV show. And when they’re told off, laughed at or rejected from being able to work towards that career as a result, they’re left mystified.
Why is this?
Let’s look at two of the career usual suspects that this applies to for an answer: doctors and lawyers.
Given the fact that many TV shows are either based squarely on their workplaces or feature main characters who do one of these jobs, it’s probably unsurprising that many people are drawn to these jobs as a result of seeing them on TV.
But it’s not just that they’re on lots of shows that draws people into these careers; it’s also the way they are portrayed. Leaving aside the fact that in general both of these professions are portrayed as being well-paid and glamorous–even if some shows also highlight their darker sides–what causes them to appeal to make so many people want to do these jobs is that lawyers always spend their getting serial killers banged up, speaking elocuently and powerfully in a packed court house as they deliver the damning evidence that sends them down; or doctors spend their time dramatically pulling back sufferers of incredibly rare diseases from the brink of death.
If you want to find out what’s wrong with such portrayals, all you need to do is get the opinion of them of lawyers who actually spend their time doing things like defending people accused of shoplifting from poundstores, or doctors who spend the bulk of their time treating the cuts, bruises and fractures of drunks and clumsy children. They will probably tell you that they’ve yet to see a TV show that accurately reflects the routine, boring side of the job they do, and will only be able to name a couple of shows that accurately present the negative side of the job.
And careers advisors and admissions tutors are also fully aware of this. And they also know that a person who does cite a TV show figure as their source of inspiration probably isn’t aware of the gap that exists between TV and reality–certainly with regards to this specific career, and quite possibly also in general–and as such is not a suitable candidate for their course.
This kneejerk aversion to people taking careers inspiration from TV heros is understandable, given that no course tutor wants places to be taken up by people who haven’t bothered to research their career, but it is also a little inflexible. Can it really be claimed that everyone who initially got an interest in a career through a TV show doesn’t really understand what it’s all about?
The answer is almost certainly no, even if this is a case with a good proportion of them. The key deciding factor is what they have then done to find out about what the career is actually like, through doing things like attending trials at one of their local courts, or completing work experience in a hospital and volunteering to look after old people. Take steps such as these, and you’re likely to find out what it’s really like; and if you still like what you see, then your motivation for the career is essentially sound.
The thing is, though, that in seeing the career as it really is, your motivation for doing it has in fact changed, from the fictional version to the real one. The moral of the story, then, is that although it’s fine to have your initial, childlike amazement with the job come from TV, the career choice then needs to be explored in a more mature way before settling on it. And then it’s just a question of never, ever telling them about the TV show part. It’s just not a risk worth taking.
Tagged careers, work experience, doctors, lawyers, TV shows
Are you mentally ready for #exams?
Bad news: it’ll be exam time farily soon. Eep! Alright, we may currently not have quite reached D-Day yet; but we know it’s coming.
And when it does come, it pays to be ready. We don’t just mean in terms of doing lots of revision; that’s something that it pretty much goes without saying that you’ll need to do. No, we mean ready in terms of psychology. Mastering your subject content is obviously a fundamentally important aspect of being ready to face down all those tough questions that’ll be coming your way, but if you’re not psychologically prepared for the mental strain created by exams, it’s quite possible that all that hard revision graft will come to nothing.
The psychological dimensions of exams are often overshadowed by the emphasis placed on revising, but look around you and you’ll find evidence of the merits of being mentally prepared as well. You’ll see it in the student who virtually revised themselves to death out of a fear of failure, only to not get the marks that all their hard work deserved. Why? Because they were left mentally and emotionally shattered by the pressure they put themselves under.
And you can see it in the person who cockily strolled into the exam, assuming that their preparation would let them stroll through the exam, only to find when the results came that they’d lost their way when answering the exam questions. When this happens to people we could just view it as complacency, but it’s also the case that by understating what was at stake and the difficulty of the task, they weren’t capable of seeing the exam as a challenge from a psychological standpoint. They may well have had all the sujbject knowledge they needed stored in their head, but because they saw the exam as no big deal they didn’t see fit to make proper use of it. Hence why such cases are more than just a matter of simple complacency.
So, psychological preparation is vital. But where do you begin with it? Well, the underlying goal is to make sure that on the one hand you are not unduly stressed and panicked by the prospect of an exam, meaning your brain won’t freeze up when you’re in the exam hall. But at the other extreme, it also means making sure you don’t just view the exam as a joke or a formality, as if you do this you’ll be unlikely to fully scrutinize the questions and be alert to the traps that the examiners have set in their questions.
There are all sorts of techniques you can use to get yourself into the happy middle ground that exists between these two extremes, but as a starting point we’d like to make the following two suggestions:
1: Put everything into perspective
To some, exams are an Extremely Big Deal, with your entire career hopes hanging on each and every one. To others, they’re a piece of cake, and not performing well in them is totally consequence free.
Neither of these two positions is helpful, with the first creating a sense of pressure and panic and the other lulling people into a false sense of security. It’s important to keep a healthy level of perspective on your exams. On the one hand, no single exam will ever determine your life chances, so don’t spend your time envisaging catastrophic scenarios of failure. There’s always a chance to try again, or to turn your efforts to something else that will ultimately be just as rewarding. On the other hand, no-one really likes to fail, and you’ve got nothing to lose at all by putting the full weight of your efforts into your exams, even if there’s a voice in your head telling you they’re going to be dead easy.
We suggest that you look at the two extremes we’ve outlined above. If you think one contains shades of how you react to exams, focus on the perspective that counterbalances. So, worriers: remember that exams are not a matter of life or death; chillaxers: remember that even if you think it’ll be easy or that the exams don’t matter, there’s nothing to be gained from taking that attitude into the exam with you.s
#2: Don’t caught up in the mentality of the exam herd
It’s pretty rare for us to be the only person we know sitting any given exam. Most of the time, we count amongst our friends some or all of the classmates who will be taking the exam with us. Even if your classmates are just acquaintances, you’ll inevitably see them in the huddle of people that develops outside the exam hall before it’s due to begin.
Now, the thing with people when they interact with one another is that their attitudes tend to rub off on one another. So if the prevailing mood amongst a proportion of a group of students is that the exam they’re going to take is going to be impossible to pass, you can bet that in the ten minutes before everyone goes into the exam hall they’ll have convinced a good chunk of the other students to buy into their panic.
The same thing can happen on a more slow-burning basis if you have friends who are taking the same exam as you and you spend time with them in the build-up to it. If you have a friend who is panic revising day and night and continually harping on about how stressed they are, then it’s difficult not to start asking yourself whether you should be doing the same.
In the face of all this, the best course of action is to follow the sage advice of that poet. You know the one, the fella who also makes fruit pies or something. It goes a little something like this:
IF you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs […] Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it / And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
Or, if you can’t keep your head under such circumstances, we’ve got a better solution: stay away from people who are likely to try and infect you with their panic!
Tagged revision, exam preparation, psychology