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#Gapyear #adventures: #Camps #International

Among the noblest of the gap-yearers (or do you prefer to call yourself gappers? Or gap-yearists? Gappies? Gapistas?) the months they spend between school and university or university and employment need to be used for one thing: changing or saving the world.

This type of gapista (we decided the last one sounded best) doesn’t want to waste their precious time on purely self-centred, hedonistic activities such as bussing it around Europe, frequenting the nightspots of the continent’s capitals by night and sleeping in at the youth hostel by day. Oh no. They know that they can make a difference to people and planet, and by jove are they going to do so.

Alright, this type of gapista is as rare as unicorns. Even the most selfless of us would permit ourselves at least a little bit of travelling purely for enjoyment’s sake on our gap year. But this doesn’t change the fact that many, many people taking gap years to have a healthy dollop of social conscience, and they’d love nothing more than to make use of it by helping other people for at least part of their gap year, preferably in a way that also lets them experience new places.

But the problem for such well intentioned people is that often it’s difficult to know exactly what to do. People with specific career ambitions have it easier. Medics, for example, can do volunteer healthcare work abroad. But those of us who want to help but don’t know how often end up being overfaced by choices and unable to decide what kind of overseas voluntary initiative to sign up to.

If all this sounds familiar to you then we may have the gap-year package provider that might just be able to soothe your tired decision-making muscles. May we present to you Camps International, a company whose volunteer packages will allow you to help out in all sorts of different ways at your chosen destination.

With ample experience in the gap-year game and a reputation built on providing ethically sound gap-year packages, Camps International are a great organisation to turn to if you know you want to help out abroad but don’t know what to do.

What we really like about their packages is the way that they combine lots of different voluntary activities, and even throw in a couple of cultural ones on top. So, for example, were you to take one of their longer-length South American packages, during your two- or three-month trip you’d be able to spend several weeks doing community projects with local people; carry out rainforest conservation work; help local endangered wildlife; and also take Spanish language lessons and guided city tours to discover the culture of the country you’re staying in.

Phew! That’s a fair number of experiences. Enough to fill any gap year, and as such a great idea for people who either want to do it all or can’t decide on one single thing to do.

Camp International have packages covering Asia, South America and Africa, and the longer the package you take, the more experiences you can do. Their packages vary in price between around £800 and £3000, and in length between two weeks and three months.

For more info, why not head on over to www.campsinternational.com?

Posted in Gap years | Tagged , , , , , |

#Careers #ideas: #information #management

Having revealed all about careers in magazine and newspaper journalism like some sort of celebrity kiss-and-tell exclusive, our look at careers that you might want to consider now takes a sharp turn away from the world of the media and writing and towards the world of, umm, libraries and offices, the natural habitat of the information professional.

Okay, you may be thinking that after giving you the scoop on a career that potentially involved undercover reporting or writing stories on the events everyone was talking about, perhaps in some exotic overseas locale, libraries and offices is a bit dull.

But that’s where you’d be wrong. Well, maybe. It all depends on what you think is interesting. While some people would find the work of information managers and librarians dull, those in the profession would tell you that not only does it immerse them in a fascinating world that somehow combines the most advanced technology and the most ancient of manuscripts, but they also do something indisputably useful: get people access to the information and knowledge they need to do their jobs and live their lives.

So what exactly so information managers and librarians do? And why have we lumped these two seemingly completely different job titles together?

Well, let’s answer the first question first. Information managers and librarians are responsible for ensuring that all the sources of information in the place where they work are organised logically and accurately, and that people who need to access that information can get hold of it as easily as possible.

Now, that might sound a bit vague to you, and you may even think it doesn’t sound like a proper job. After all, surely people who want information just look it up on the computer network of their workplace if it’s something relaeted to their work, or go to a library or use the web if they’re a student?

But the fact is that you wouldn’t be able to do any of these things if it wasn’t for information managers and librarians. They’re the people who decide on the best way to organize the company’s files, or give a code to all the books in the library that lets people locate them easily off the shelves, or create the databases that your mobile phone company keeps your account information in.

Without these good folks we’d all just be left with a mass of books, files and customer details that were in a big heap. And then nothing would get done, and quite possibly we’d just have to revert to nature and start living in the woods, foraging for berries and insects.

Back in the olden days, there was really only one major repository of information: the library. And so librarians were the original information managers. They still exist, working their organising magic on print and digital copies of books, journals, photos and other things at public and university libraries across the world.

But in recent centuries the world has become a more complicated place, with government institutions and companies keeping more and more information every day. Every single bill for a customer or patient record is a piece of information that needs to be stored correctly. And so the skills of the librarian started to be used in these workplaces, and soon a new career–information management–was born.

Information management and librarianship are great careers that love to solve problems and create order and clarity out of chaos and confusion. It’s also a career area that is equally suitable for science fans and arts-and-humanities lovers; the former have got the skills for the more technical, database and IT stuff, while the latter will fit right in at a university library or managing the collections of a museum.

To get into this career, you need to have a degree that is accredited by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (known as CILIP to its friends). You can either do a degree that focuses more on the commercial side of information management, one focused on librarianship, or a more general degree that will give you a more all-round grounding in both areas. It doesn’t matter if you do a CILIP-accredited undergraduate degree or a one-year master’s one–both will get you into the profession. This is especially useful for people who are already graduates, who in many cases can potentially make use of the subject expertise from their previous degree in their career as an information professional.

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Ever thought about trying #online #university #study? Then give a #MOOC a go!

Although distance education is almost as old as the hills, as with pretty much all other aspects of life it has been revolutionised by the Internet.

Gone are the days of students receiving books and lecture notes in the mail, or setting their video recorders–remember them?–to tape Open University lectures broadcast during the wee hours. They’ve been replaced with all sorts of innovative online learning options, from videoconference seminars, live chat sessions with teachers or lecturers, on-demand video lectures and ebooks. Learning without having to step foot outside of your home–or even getting out of your dressing gown–has never been easier.

One thing that has stayed the same until very recently, however, was that the biggest players of distance education had stayed the same. The Open University continues to be the place to turn in this country if you want to get a degree through this method of learning. And quite right, too: this groundbreaking seat of learning is something that we Brits should be as proud of as we are our ancient universities.

Until recently your three options for distance higher-education learning were following a degree at the Open University, choosing from the much more limited set of options offered by other, ‘real-world’ universities, or taking a degree with one of the other, less well-known distance or online universities, some of which are not necessarily of the highest academic quality.

A distance-learning course can seem like a bit of a gamble for some people. This isn’t because of the quality of the courses–if you take your degree with the Open University or one of the UK’s other universities you can count on it being just as accepted as a qualification as a face-to-face degree–but rather because distance learning is for most people a bit of an unknown quantity. And with tuition fees steadily climbing, the prospect of shelling out thousands of pounds for something they might not enjoy doing could be seen as too much of a gamble.

However, recent developments in online learning have led to the birth of a new type of distance course, known as a Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC for short). These courses are offered by academics at some of the world’s leading universities, including some of the big Ivy League names from the States. And, perhaps best of all, they’re completely free to enrol in and take.

One of the leading providers of MOOCs is Coursera. All you do is register on the site, searchthrough the database of courses, and sign up for the ones you want to take. Then it’s a question of following and participating in the course through a combination of watching video lectures, completing weekly assignments and joining in course forum discussions.

The list of courses available is expanding all the time, with courses from within most of the key subjects taught at universities now being covered in some form or another. And the fact that there are generally no entrance tests or prior entry requirements, combined with the courses being completely free, means that these courses are a great way of both trying out a subject you’re curious about and seeing if distance learning is for you.

At present these courses are not the same as doing a full degree. You’ll get a certificate of completion for each one you do, but no matter how many you take you won’t get a degree from it. Nevertheless, this certainly doesn’t make them a waste of your time. As we say, they’re ideal if you think of them as taster courses. And they could even informally help you with a university application, as completing one demonstrates an interest in and commitment to your chosen subject.

Posted in Uncategorized, university | Tagged , , , , |

How to cut down your #revision #reading

At Leaving School we never like to be the bearer of bad news. However, we feel it is our duty to tell you something that you’re probably not going to want to hear: within the next few months, you’ll probably have to do some exams.

And like every time you do exams, you’ll have to drag yourself through the process of getting your act together for revision. Things won’t get any more cheerful when it comes to actually doing the revision, either; hours of being chained to a desk and reading, re-reading and re-re-reading notes await you.

Or do they? Is there in fact another way you could revise without having to force yourself to spend hours on end staring at a computer screen, text book or piles of revision notes?

We reckon that there is, in fact, another way of doing things. It’ll sound a bit silly at first, and you will still have to do some of the confinement-in-the-library/bedroom stuff, but if you give this idea a go you might find that you can combine your revision with a bit of blessed freedom.

As we’ve rather unsubtely been trying to hint at, one of the worst aspects of doing revision is the physical act of reading. Not only does it mean that you have to stay cooped up indoors–try reading over your notes while simultaneously going for a walk in the countryside and time how long it takes before you fall over–but it also uses up a lot of your mental energy, hence why after about half an hour your brain is screaming at you to take a break.

But your eyes aren’t the only way that that pretty little head of yours can take in information. It can also do it using those flappy things on the side of your head. You know, the ones with the holes in. The things that pick up the noises.

Imagine if you could listen to your revision instead of reading it. Your eyes would be freed up, meaning you’d also get back your mobility–think about all those tasks you do while listening to your mp3 player–and you wouldn’t expend quite so much energy concentrating. And many people also find they retain information far more easily when they hear it compared with when they read it.

By this point you’ve probably picked up on a small spanner in the works: you don’t have an audio version of your notes. To that we say this: make one. All you need is your own voice and some sort of microphone to record it onto your computer. Just read your revision notes into it out loud, slowly and clearly. Then put them on your mp3 player. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

If the idea of doing this makes you feel a bit self-conscious–and many people do hate the sound of their own voice–we have two alternative options for you. One is that many computers can read documents aloud, and so if you type your notes into the computer–maybe you’ve done this already–it can read them to you and your computer can record it.

Alternatively, if you can rope a friend into this crazy scheme of ours you can record one another’s revision notes, so they listen to you and you listen to them. If you’ve got the budget for it you could even get an actor or voiceover artist to do it for you. That’s your call, though.

But just imagine a world of audio revision notes. It’s one where you can combine revision with those other things you have to do in life, like catching the bus and going for a run. And who knows, maybe you’ll discover that you’ve got a natural talent in the spoken word and it’ll be the thing that finally made you realise your destiny was to be the next BBC continuity announcer.

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#Careers #ideas: #magazine #journalism

A week or two back we kicked off our blog-post series on careers ideas with a look at newspaper journalism. Today we’d like to introduce you to its more laid-back, slightly more hip brother, magazine journalism.

Some people are under the impression that the people who write magazines are the same as the people who write newspaper articles. But while there’s some overlap between the two fields, they’re in many ways different beasts from one another.

Newspaper journalism is generally a lot more of an intense career than magazine journalism. In addition to it requiring journalists to churn out stories to very regular and tight deadlines, the race to be the first to cover a story also makes the newspaper journalist’s life rather hectic.

Magazine journalists, on the other hand, don’t have to work under quite the same pressures, though they too have plenty of deadlines to meet. But because much of magazine journalism is based around feature articles or reviews, the journalists are under less time pressure.]

Magazine journalism’s big challenges instead come from different areas. In this field there’s more emphasis on producing articles that are a pleasure to read. While newspaper journalism is often quite functional, magazine journalism is about putting an innovative or engaging spin on something that could otherwise seem quite ordinary, or capturing the emotions and atmosphere of something that the reader may have never experienced before, whether it be getting caught up in a riot or trekking through the Amazon Rainforest.

If you actively enjoy the challenges of producing good-quality writing, then, magazine journalism could be an ideal career for you.

Another important difference between magazine journalism and newspaper is also the qualifications needed to do them. While newspaper journalists need to learn all sorts of skills that’ll help them as they’re on the hunt of a story, which they acquire usually through a degree or postgraduate diploma in journalism, the pathway into magazine journalism is a bit more open. Essentially, if you can prove yourself as a good writer then you’re in with a shot of finding work in this field.

The difficulty can be getting the chance to prove that you’ve got what it takes. Editors aren’t going to take you at your word. Or rather, they are going to take you at your word, but only if that word is accompanied by lots of others in a collection of beautifully written and original articles within a portfolio of your work.

Where many people come unstuck when trying to break into a field like this is that they think they need to get a paid job in the sector before they can get this experience. But in actual fact you really need to get this experience so that you can get the paid job. This means doing things under your own initiative, such as running your own blog, getting involved in student journalism and writing articles that you send to magazines in an attempt to get them published. As part of this you’ll probably have to turn to publications that don’t pay their writers.

Getting work experience at a magazine is also good experience, as editors always appreciate people who understand the behind-the-scenes mechanics of producing a magazine. So by doing something like sub-editing or secretarial work you can get an idea of how magazines work from the inside and use it to your advantage.

Many magazine journalists don’t strictly speaking work for magazines at all. Instead, they are freelancers who write for a variety of publications on a regular or semi-regular basis, having gained the trust and confidence of their editor. On the one hand this gives them a varied workload that they control, but on the other it can seem like a bit of an uncertain career path where you’re only as good as your last article.

In spite of the difficulties of breaking into the sector, however, if you enjoy writing about real life–and especially if you have a passion for a particular field about which lots of magazines are published, such as video games or sports–then magazine journalism is certainly something you could consider trying your hand at.

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#Access #courses: a great alternative to #ALevels for #mature #students

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had a look at alternatives to taking A Levels. We’ve seen how the International Baccalaureate offers people the chance to combine rigorous academic study with taking six subjects at once, providing there’s an IB centre near you; and we’ve discussed that attractiveness of BTEC courses for people who want their learning to be more practically focused and more explicitly related to the careers that are based around the subjects they want to study.

In discussing these A Level alternatives, we’ve seen that both are accepted by universities when it comes to them weighing up course applicants and making offers. So for people who are making the transition from secondary school to college, with their subsequent intended destination being higher education, the IB and the BTEC are both attractive options.

What do you do, however, if you’ve been off the education treadmill for a while? Although A Levels, the IB and BTECs are open to people of all ages and circumstances, in practice people who have been away from education for a few years or more can sometimes find it difficult to adapt to studying courses that were designed with young people in particular in mind.

This is partly a question of availability, with many colleges only offering these qualifications on a full-time basis. But it can also be a matter of being acclimatised for a return to study. The longer people have been outside of education, the more likely that it is that they’ll have started to lose effective study habits. And in some cases they may have never had a chance to develop them at all, depending on their own particular school-days experiences.

There used to be a time when people who wanted to go to university but hadn’t had a decent run of things the first time they went to school found it very difficult to have another go at getting the qualifications they needed to do so as a result of the inflexibility of the qualifications system. Now, however, through the Access course system, those people are in a much better position to restart their education.

Offered by further-education institutions across the country, Access courses are a great first step on the road to university if you either didn’t come away from school with many qualifications or it’s been quite a while since you last set foot in a classroom.

Unlike BTECs, A Levels or the IB, Access courses are designed specifically to prepare you for the demands of higher education in your chosen subject. This means they place a decent level of emphasis on academic skills in addition to teaching the subject knowledge that you’ll need before you start at uni.

And unlike A Levels or the IB, Access courses specialise in one area only, being offered under labels such as Access to Business or Access to Law. The upside of this is of course that you’re already specialising in what you presumably want to study at university; the other side of this particular coin is of course that if you’re not sure what you want to study at university Access courses can sometimes be a bit restrictive.

That said, it tends to be the case that when people do return to education with the goal of getting into uni, it’s because they have a clear vision of what they want to study and how it will help them with their career. If you find yourself in this boat, an Access course could be your best bet for turning that vision into a reality.

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#Gapyear adventures: #volunteering abroad with i-to-i

Last week on our blog we kicked off a new series of posts on different gap-year adventure options by looking at the working holiday and volunteering opportunities offered by BUNAC. Today’s post brings us to another of the big players in the gap year industry: i-to-i. Stick around for this one if you like the idea of helping to save the planet one tree and endangered animal at a time!

i-to-i have almost two decades of experience behind them in sending young people around the world, with over 5,000 students a year signing up for one of their schemes. And although i-to-i is a company rather than a charity, its business model is to work in partnership with local organisations based across the world for certain key parts of their schemes such as accommodation and local transport, meaning that a good chunk of the fee you pay finds its way into the local economy of the developing country in which you are staying. This is all part of i-to-i’s philosophy of helping local economies in the developing world without building up a dynamic of aid dependence for those local communities.

Of course, your contribution to the local community should you book a place on an i-to-i project goes far beyond your money being funnelled into the local economy. The company offers one of the most diverse portfolios of volunteering experiences available, both in terms of the volunteer work you can do and the places you can do it. At present i-to-i run volunteering projects in over twenty different countries, located in Asia, Africa, Oceania and Central and South America.

The company is particularly noted for the wildlife and environmental conservation projects it offers. If you’re idea of a life-changing gap-year experience is getting up close and personal with some of the world’s rarest and most amazing creatures, then its panda conservation and lion cubs packages could be perfect for you. Equally you could find yourself helping to preserve the Amazon Rainforest or the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands.

If working with people rather than creatures or plants is more your thing then i-to-i also have plenty of packages that could be of interest to you. If you think you might be interested in teaching as a career, their two- and four-week TEFL packages are a great way to try out your teaching skills and also help some of the poorest kids in the world. And people who are more hands-on can get really stuck into their building and construction projects. What bigger difference is it possible to make to the lives’ of some of the world’s most underprivileged communities than helping them to get a roof over their heads?

All told, i-to-i’s schemes provide a really accessible way to use part of your gap year to give something back to the global community and visit some seriously far-flung parts of the world. Do keep in mind, however, that i-to-i’s gap-year experiences typically tend to be less than a month in duration, so should probably be seen as just one component of a gap year–albeit a spectacular one–rather than a plan for the whole year.

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#BTECs: another alternative to #Alevels

As anyone who knows anything about teenagers knows, right now fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds up and down the land have only one thing on their mind: what to study after they finish their GCSEs.

Although there are all sorts of different types of qualifications offered by the further education sector, nine times out of ten students’ thinking on what subjects to take gravitates towards AS/A2s, the latest incarnation of A Levels, one of the British education system’s longest-running qualifications. Having taken on many slightly different forms over the years and dating all the way back to the 1950s, they’re a bit like the Doctor Who of study options.

The venerable old age of the A Level has ensured that it tends to dominate young people’s thoughts when it comes to deciding what to study. However, it’s certainly not the only one that you can take. And depending on what your career hopes are, what subjects you want to focus on and how you like to study, it might not necessarily be the best choice of qualification for you.

The thing about A Levels is that, as quite a traditional qualification, they’re built around the old-school disciplines that used to be the norm for teaching and training people, but which for some people seem a bit detached from the real world.

For example, if your goal was to become a mechanical engineer, under a more traditional approach to education your path to this goal would be to take A Levels in Physics and Maths (and probably one or two other things) before then going to university. The thing is that those A Levels in Physics and Maths aren’t designed specifically to train people as engineers, but rather to explore those subjects from a more academic and abstract angle.

Some people are happy with this, but others aren’t. For them, explanations of forces that aren’t grounded in real examples or applied to specific situations simply seem irrelevant. And for this group of people, being put off by the content of that A Level in turn puts them off their desire to become a mechanical engineer, even if they’ve got a real instinctive knack for understanding how machines work and would have been perfect for the job.

Somewhat unfortunately, the long shadow cast by A Levels can hide from these people’s views the fact that there is another qualification out there that will both allow them to achieve their career goals and be taught in a way they enjoy, with all the content of the qualification being designed to prepare them for that specific career.

Step forward the BTEC. This innovative family of qualifications has been going since 1984, making it much more spritely than the A Level. If it were a footballer, it’d be considered as being at its professional peak right now. And take it from us that if you’ve got hopes of one day doing a highly skilled job but don’t feel very enthused by the A Level options you’ve seen, it could well be the thing that gets you to that professional peak.

BTEC Extended Diplomas are available for about twenty different professional fields, ranging from Art and Design to Travel and Tourism. If you take a BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma instead of A Levels, all of your studies will focus around giving you the skills and knowledge you need for that field, while at the same time offering you a wide range of different options within it to focus on the parts of it that interest you the most.

And because they’re regarded as a really rigorous, in-depth qualification, they’re as good for getting you a place at university as A Levels. Getting the top grades in a BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma nets you 420 UCAS Tariff Points-the equivalent of 3 A-grade A Levels and 1 A-grade AS Level.

Oh, and did we mention that BTECs are a lot less based around exams than A Levels? Here at Leaving School we always like to save the best ’til last!

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Careers ideas: #newspaper #journalism

Unless you’re part of that driven, single-minded minority of people who have known exactly what career path they wanted to follow since an age when they couldn’t have possibly even really understood what that job involved, the idea of deciding on a future career probably seems fairly exasperating.

Of course, you might not have felt this exasperation; that’s probably because as of yet your brain hasn’t tried to make you think about it. Instead, you’re leading a happy-go-lucky, take-each-day-as-it-comes existence. Which is fine. After all, you’re young, and you should enjoy the carefree liberty that youth brings rather than getting bogged down in the angst of having to settle on how in the future you’re going to simultaneously pay the bills and spend your waking hours doing something that doesn’t make you want to curl up into a little ball and start sobbing uncontrollably.

But while enjoying your current lack of responsibilities and just living in the present moment is great, career-decision day will ultimately come. And just as Sarah Connor wisely started stockpiling guns in preparation for Judgment Day (hey, just because Terminator 2 is probably older than you are doesn’t stop it being a film worth referencing!), so too would you be wise to start arming yourself with information about different types of jobs for when that day comes.

We thought we’d give you a nudge in the right direction with some blog entries on different types of jobs you could consider. In this first posting from the series, we look at the world of newspaper journalism.

Although the market for printed newspapers has been in decline for a good few years now, largely due to the rise of digital media, there is still–and probably always will be–demand for written articles that present the news in an informative fashion, analyse the complexities of going-on from across the world, tell of exciting new products and trends or simply keep people entertained.

That’s where you, the journalist, come in. It will be your assignment, should you accept it, to write these articles. While this could mean covering international diplomatic events, in practice the majority of newspaper journalists work for local papers, writing about happenings such as crimes, court cases, local-government decisions, significant local events or interesting local people. If you’re doing these same things at a national newspaper, it means you’re working in the upper echelons of your profession.

An alternative to working for a newspaper is to work for a news agency; your role would be much the same, with the difference being that your stories are sold by the agency to various newspapers. Some journalists also work as freelancers, meaning they are responsible for selling the stories they write to newspaper editors. The rewards can be bigger, but really this is for seasoned journalists with a good network of contacts.

Now, unless as a journalist you move into the world of writing opinion pieces, your daily workload is likely to be more based around researching stories than it is writing them up. You’re the person who will be attending the press conferences where information about events is passed on to journalists; it’s you who’ll go around knocking on doors, asking for interviews with people who might have witnessed the story you are covering; you’re the one who’ll be attending trials to then recount what happened that day in court; and you’re the lucky guy who gets to sit in the press box at Premier League games so that you can then write a match report that gives the lowdown on the talking points people will be discussing in the pub later that evening.

All this means a lot of being away from your desk, and often working at weekends or at night–stories break twenty-four hours a day, and someone has to be on the scene to cover them. And although you’ll be reporting on the powerful, rich and famous, you’ll probably be earning but a fraction of what they make, unless you reach the very top of the profession or make the transition into television.

But on the other hand, you’ll be at the very heart of the events that everyone’s talking about and shaping the way that people see the world. And, as any journalist will tell you, there’s no rush like the one that comes from being the first to break a big story or unmasking high-level wrongdoing through your dogged research.

To get into newspaper journalism, there are two things you need. Firstly, and unless you have contacts in the media who can pull strings for you–it is unfortunately a bit of a nepotistic world–you’ll need to prove you’ve got what it takes in terms of motivation, news-gathering and writing skills through getting some relevant work experience. This could include writing for your student paper, doing a work placement at your local paper, or maintaining your own blog.

The other near-compulsory thing is to get a journalism qualification. There are two main routes to this. One is to study a journalism course at university, while the other is to take a postgraduate diploma in journalism having done a degree in something else. Whichever of these you choose, it’s essential that the course is accredited by the National Council for the Training of Journalists; this is your guarantee that you’re doing a course that covers the skills and knowledge that newspaper editors are looking for when they hire people.

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Awesome opportunities with #BUNAC for your #gapyear

Over on our main site we recently put up a spiffing little article about the pros and cons of taking a gap year, which also included some broad suggestions of things you could do were you to take one.

Since it went live we’ve had a steady stream of emails asking us for more information about the different gap-year endeavours that we alluded to in the article. It seems that you clever lot have twigged that before you go charging overseas to live the gap-year dream it’s best to get a full picture of what your options are.

So we thought that over the coming weeks we could make use of this here blog to give you just such a lowdown, specifically on some of our favourite gap year schemes. And since the idea of working abroad seemed to be a particularly popular idea, what better place for us to start than with the opportunities offered by BUNAC, an organisation that has been making working holiday dreams come true since 1962?

Although those five capital letters stand for British Universities North America Club, in recent decades BUNAC has expanded its reach across the globe, giving thousands upon thousands of young people opportunities to experience life in other countries, whether through arranging work visas for them or parachuting them into voluntary or internship placements.

BUNAC are probably best known for their year-long working visa schemes, which currently are available for Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These visas offer a very simple way of embarking on a working holiday. Simply by filling in a couple of forms and paying the relevant fee, BUNAC will take care of the bureaucratic and consular mazes that people usually have to navigate their way through when applying for an overseas work visa.

But BUNAC’s working-visa service doesn’t end there. They also have an excellent network of offices around the world that are on hand to steer you through the trickier aspects of finding work and a place to live in a new country. When you arrive in your chosen country–and you even have the option to book a seat on a flight with fellow BUNACeers if you want to make some new friends before you even get there–you’ll attend an orientation session, at which you’ll be given advice on creating a CV that’s suitable for the local labour market, where to look for jobs and how to find a room in an apartment. And after that they’re more than happy for you to drop into their office and make use of their resources and contacts as you go about your job hunt.

In many destinations the BUNAC office also organises a lively social scene that can include regular pub nights and trips to nearby attractions. So even if you’re planning to go it alone on your gap year you can be safe in the knowledge you’ll have plenty of opportunities to meet like-minded people.

In more recent years BUNAC has added volunteering and internship opportunities to its portfolio, meaning that if you want to combine your travels with some sort of specialist experience they’re the people to talk to. For example, people who have in the past entertained notions of one day becoming a teacher will likely be very interested in the opportunities they provide to spend a year teaching English in China or Chile, or coaching sports in South Africa. There are plenty of opportunities for the more environmentally minded as well, such as working on wildlife research projects or helping to maintain the USA’s breathtaking national parks.

But regardless of whether you would prefer work or volunteering, you can be sure that with BUNAC’s schemes you’ll be getting that perspective-shifting, horizon-expanding, once-in-a-lifetime cocktail of fun and enhancing your future career prospects that gap years are all about.

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