About us Contact us
← Older posts
Newer posts →

Student debt: was it all worth it?

Ah, graduation…a marker of the beginning of your new life as a fully-fledged graduate; soaring on the wings of your academic prowess, swooping on the memories of the good times had, and then WHAM: the sudden realization of a catastrophic saddling of debt and the wind goes from beneath you.

Having just graduated, I am fully aware of this weight around both mine, and my fellow graduates necks, and for goodness knows how long. Especially in the economy we currently find ourselves in where scary statistics about our chances of employment are everywhere we turn; you can’t help but ask, “Was it really worth it?”

Despite all the bad weather surrounding this contentious issue, I say that, for me, it was worth it. And no, I am not writing this from a cushy-managerial chair in a large corporate, well-respected, will-give-me-a-lifetime-of-opportunities firm, but instead from an unpaid internship (although still in a remarkably comfortable chair) and waitressing at the weekends. I am writing this as someone who loved her university stint, her university city and the many ‘extra-curriculars’ she managed to get involved in. (I am clearly talking about various societies I took part in here, not any other extra-curriculars you might be thinking of…!)

So, why was it worth it? Well, I believe that university can, not only provide a degree (hopefully at any rate), but also a wealth of life experience and literally hundreds of opportunities to help you discover a bit more about who you are and what you want to do. You have the chance to meet people from all over the place, take part in sports at a really high level (if you want to, this may physically repulse some people), write for the student paper, work for charities, and, from a more conscientious viewpoint, study something you are really interested in at a much more in depth level.

A student loan will, for many people, be the only way that makes this all possible; it certainly was for me, in fact pretty much everyone at uni will be saddled with a similar financial burden. So in that respect, without wanting too sound happy-clappy about it: ‘you’re all in this together’. That helps. Big time. Getting a job too will also make life that little bit easier (even if it’s just one evening/day a week), however sometimes this isn’t always possible and that’s where the university itself can come in handy. Most universities will have some money available for grants if you know where to look for it. Check out Emergency Grants, or even try contacting your subject department. At the end of the day they want you to be there, so they will try to help you out. Overdrafts can be a lifesaver, especially as part of a student account where interest can be avoided for up to three years after you graduate…good times.

So, I guess, in conclusion the message of this is that ‘you only live once’ (or YOLO for the more gangster amongst us), and that at this moment in time, my experiences at university were worth millions, not mere thousands of pounds…

If you need help and advice on student loans then visit www.leavingschool.co.uk

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

Postgraduate Applications

Just as applying for an undergraduate course brought with it a set of challenges and pitfalls, so too does the application stage of making that transition to postgraduate studies. Yes, once again you have to select a place to go, a course to study and the right words to sell yourself on the application form.

In spite of these similarities, however, it’s unwise to think that the process of applying to do a postgraduate course is just UCAS II. For one thing, the timeframe is completely different. While the official UCAS deadline for application went by a week ago, January tends to be the starting point for people to apply for a postgraduate course, with many universities not even accepting applications to them before that point. Hence the timing of this here blog post.

But the differences between undergraduate and postgraduate applications don’t end there. In fact, a different set of dates is the least of your worries if you’re playing with the idea of staying on or returning as a student.

Unfortunately, seeing that the broad brushstrokes of the two application processes seem to be the same, many students approach and execute the task in exactly the same way. But that way lies danger, and probably also rejection letters.

Fear not, though. The leavingschool.co.uk blog has seen and done it all before, and would like to offer you this potted guide to applying for a postgrad course before you embark on this exciting journey for yourself.

Step One: Choose a course

Be honest, when you applied to university for your first degree did you base your decisions solely on academic factors, or did other considerations creep in, such as the quality of the university’s social scene or where your chums were heading? For the majority of people, these non-academic factors will certainly have at least played some role in their decision. And they may have even been the main consideration for some people, who didn’t really know about the specifics of their course at that particular uni until the first day of lectures.

But picking a place to do postgraduate studies isn’t like that. Here, academics is (almost) everything. Postgraduate courses are all about specialisation, meaning there’s a huge difference between one university’s version of a course and another’s. You need to make sure you pick a course that covers exactly what you want to study, which ultimately means you need to scrutinise every module that it offers. And you’ll also need to make sure the university is a leader in your subject,which you can do by consulting our university guides.

Contacting the academic staff who run the course is also a key part of this process, something which undergraduate applicants don’t really do. Not only will they be able to give you a full idea of what their course can offer you, you’ll also be making yourself known to them as an eager and inquisitive student. As will become clear later, this will help you at the next stage of this process.

Step Two: Get writing your statement

But under absolutely no circumstances should you just rehash your old UCAS personal statement, even if the course you’re applying for is in the same subject as your undergraduate degree. Because not only do you need to show a much more sophisticated and in-depth understanding of the subject, but you also probably need to show your ability to write is that of a graduate and not a school-leaver.

There are other important differences to take into account when it comes to writing the personal statement for a master’s or PhD, too. It’s very likely that you will be applying directly to each university, meaning they expect your statement to be tailored exactly to the course they offer. This means discussing specific parts of that course and why they appeal to you. And don’t think about going on at length about your Saturday job or your hobbies. At this level, the lecturers only care about one thing: your aptitude for their course.

Step Three: Look at funding options

This is where the postgraduate application experience really starts to depart from the undergraduate one. While before you probably took out a student loan–possibly supplemented by the odd handout from the Bank of Mum and Dad or a part-time job–it turns out that you can actually get paid to be a postgraduate student. But only if you’re the brightest and most motivated of the crop, however.

Funding for postgraduate studies can come from many sources, but the main ones are scholarships or bursaries offered by the university or an educational foundation linked to it, and award schemes run by government bodies. Examples of the latter include the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council. Amounts covered by all these different options can range from part of the tuition fees to all of them plus a tax-free stipend that is actually more than enough to get by in comfort.

Getting paid to be a student is many people’s idea of heaven; if you’re one of those people then you should make sure you don’t miss out when applying to do a postgraduate course. Remember how earlier we told you to contact the people who run the course and show how keen you were? This is why; they’re the people who will talk you through the funding options for your course and, if you play your cards right, write you a glowing reference for the funding application as well.

Posted in Uncategorized |

Four Ways to Make your Final Choice

Now that the gates of Fort UCAS have firmly swung shut following the 15th January deadline for applications, students tend to find that offers (yay!) or rejections (boo!) from their five uni choices start trickling in, if they had not already begun to do so just before Christmas.

And each response from one of your five adds a little more impetus to your decision-making thought process. Back when you submitted all your UCAS bumf you only had to pick five universities that you liked; very soon, you’ll have to whittle that number down to a top choice and a backup, something that many people find more difficult to do than picking those initial five.

So what’s the best way to go about making this decision? While it’s tempting to not think about it until the last possible moment, the savvy student starts weighing up his options as soon as possible. You’re making a big decision and if you get it wrong you’ll either have to put up with a university or course you don’t really like for the next three to five years or alternatively have to waste a year by dropping out and then going through the whole horrid UCAS process once more.

So even if when you made your initial selection of five places you had a firm favourite in mind it can’t do any harm to have another review of your options to make absolutely sure you’re making the right choice.

Now, you may think that this will just be a question of trying to recall what you learnt about your five choices back when you were poring through dozens of prospectuses, university websites and guide books, but there’s really no reason why you can’t do some more thorough investigating to arm yourself with all the information you need to make your choice. Knowledge is power and all that.

So here are some suggestions to help you as you weigh up your options.

Go back to the guides

You may feel that you’ve already gleaned all the information you could from the prospectuses, student guides and other literature that you trawled through when you first started thinking about university. But back then things were different: you were so young, so nave, and, most importantly, had to process tons of information about tens of places all in one go. So now is the right time to go back and read up again–this time more carefully and thoroughly–on everything there is to read about your universities and the courses you applied to at them. It could well be that, reviewing everything again, a place that you only put down to make up the numbers in fact now really appeals to you. Our own university guides are–of course–a great place to start this review process.

Pay an impromptu visit to your choices

It could be that you didn’t have the chance to visit all five of the unis that you applied to. If this is the case, now is a great time to go and have a look at them. And don’t feel you need to wait for an open day, either; while open days are a good way to learn about the academic side of things and also get the official line on life at the uni, turning up and having a look around the campus on a normal uni day is a great way to get a real feel of the atmosphere at the place. Through this you can learn, for example, if the student union bar is buzzing with post-lectures banter over drinks on a Tuesday early evening (as the university’s own prospectus will no doubt have it), or whether in fact students just unsociably scuttle off home after lectures.

Snoop around on the web and social media

This is another way of learning about how your candidate universities really are, as opposed to how they like to present themselves to you in their shiny promotional literature. Get googling and looking around Facebook groups; it’s a great way to get a sense of whether students at the uni you’re looking into are having a good time there and what they think of their courses, whether the information you learn comes from them posting photos of their shenanigans or griping about workloads.

Make use of someone that knows someone (that knows someone)

If you’re in your final year of school or college, most of your friends will probably be in the same boat as you, and so won’t have any first-hand experiences of their own about university life. It’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility, however, that they have older siblings who are at uni; and it could even be that they’re at one of your five choices. They can be a great source of information and will be able to give you the inside track on what it’s really like where they study. And if you’re currently in the middle of a gap year and have friends who are currently at university then you’re in a great position. Even if they’re not studying the same course as the one you’ve applied for, through paying them a weekend visit you can still get a much better idea of what being a student there would be like, and of course a couple of student nights out into the bargain!

Posted in Uncategorized |

Every time 15th January rolls round it can mean only one thing: the deadline for UCAS applications. After the fun of New Year is over, many people await this big day with dread. Perhaps you circled it on your calendar months ago, full of good intentions to get your application in a good long while before then. But you kept putting it off and, before you knew it, you found yourself with just a couple of days left.

Or maybe, faced with so many options to choose from, you never managed to settle on a choice of five universities and courses. Or perhaps you’ve left the decision of whether or not to apply to uni until the very last minute.

Really the question of why you’re now trying to sort out your application with just a day or so to go isn’t really important. What matters is just getting it done on time and to the best possible standard. Faced with the pressure of the imminent deadline, many people give up at this stage, putting off applying to university for next year.

If you’re in this situation, we’ve got some pretty simple advice for you: don’t give up, and don’t panic! If you put your mind to it, it is in fact possible to complete a UCAS application, from start to finish, in fewer than twenty-four hours.

So take a deep breath and follow this step-by-step guide:

Step one:

Choose a University and a Course

Okay, so this might at first seem like singularly unhelpful advice. You may be screaming “It’s thinking of what course to apply for and where to do it that got me into this mess!” right now. Fair enough. But our advice has a little twist: if you can’t decide what to do or where to go, hedge your bets. If you’re torn between a couple of different courses, apply for both of them. And if you don’t know whether a rural campus or a big-city uni is right for you, apply for a couple of each. At this stage, all you need is a selection of five choices, not a final decision.

Another good tip if you’re unsure which course to apply for is to apply to universities that offer modular degrees. More often than not these universities will allow you to take courses in a subject outside of your degree title for the first year, and then if you like that subject more you can switch to it for the rest of your degree. So a modular university means more flexibility and less pressure to make a final decision right now.

Step two:

Write a Personal Statement

Again, this on the face of it is a very obvious piece of advice, especially if the reason for your current predicament is that you’ve been suffering from writer’s block for a good few months now. But just as there’s a way of cutting through the uncertainty of what course to apply for, so too is there a strategy for getting out of the personal statement quagmire.

And it’s this: keep it simple. Personal statement writer’s block comes from being overwhelmed by knowing what you want to talk about and how you’ll organise those thoughts into paragraphs. If this was September you’d still have several months to get something on paper and then re-sculpt and fine tune it. But it’s January now, and time is short.

So here’s what you’re going to do. Open a Word document. Then create the following headings in this order: Motivation for my chosen subject(s); current/past studies; work experience; extracurricular activities. Then write about 1000 characters (including spaces) on each. Once you’re done, proofread it (and also ask someone else to proofread it for you), , delete the headings you wrote (but not the text that goes with them!), make sure the whole document is under 4,000 characters in total, and voil, you have a personal statement. It won’t be the most sophisticated statement in terms of structure, and you probably won’t have had time to pepper it with quotes from Shakespeare, Marx or Darwin, but it’ll still be more coherent and to the point than the majority of statements that admissions tutors read.

Of course, if you feel confident that you have time to do a little bit more prep work on your statement, then do head over to our helpful personal statement section for some inspiration.

Step three: sort out your reference

Now this is a less obvious step, and one that the last-minute applier often overlooks. When UCAS say their deadline is 15th January, they mean the deadline for everything, including your reference. For many people, this means you’re going to have to convince someone in an appropriate position (a teacher or, if you’re a mature student a former employer) to write a reference for you in a very short space of time.

Thanks to the internet, getting the reference form to them and them getting their reference to UCAS quickly isn’t the issue; it’s all done instantaneously by email and on the UCAS website. So the challenge now is one of motivating your referee to pull their finger out and get the reference written ASAP. To do this, you should draw on those excellent interpersonal and communication skills you’ve probably talked about in your personal statement. Start by using the word ‘please’ a lot. Only consider bribes as a last resort.

In fact, it shouldn’t be as tough to get a reference as you think. Both teachers and employers have plenty of experience of giving them, and if they know you well enough and like you they should be able to put something together in time for you, so long as you stress how urgent it is and how much going to university means to you and how they’ll be your hero forever if they just do this one thing for you.

How the process of getting the reference works depends on whether you’re currently at school or not. If you are, your application should be sent on automatically to your teachers through the UCAS system. But even so, you should definitely contact your teachers yourself to ask them to get a move on.

If you’ve left school but want a reference from a former teacher, contact your school and they’ll give you a ‘Buzzword’ code that you put into the UCAS site, which will then route your application to them. Again, personal contact with the teacher outside of the system is essential if you want to make sure they do everything by the deadline.

And if it’s been years since you’ve been anywhere near a classroom, you’ll need to get an employer to do your reference. If this applies to you, what will happen is you put in the referee’s contact details and a link will be sent to them by email that will take them to the online UCAS system, where they can copy and paste in a reference for you. Just don’t forget to call your referee beforehand to explain everything so they can get the reference sent as soon as possible!

And that’s it! Follow these three simple steps and you’ll get your application in on time and be heading off to uni in September. Good luck!

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Getting-in | Comments Off on 15th of January is your personal statement deadline!

University Choices

Posted in Uncategorized |

Revision Guides

Posted in Uncategorized |

Revision Timetables

Revision Timetables

These really can help. Teenagers may say they have a revision plan, but it sometimes amounts to no more than maths on Mondays, technology on Tuesdays and science on Saturdays.

Research shows that learning a little, but often, is best. So instead of devoting an entire evening to one subject, a lot more will stick if revision is planned in one or two hour slots.

Scheduled breaks are important because no one can concentrate properly for hours on end.

Help your child plan a revision timetable. Divide the after-school times into one-hour slots. Block out times for dinner, and build-in 15-minute breaks every hour or two.

Choose subject topics which can be revised in the one-hour slots. Don’t simply write “maths”.

Plan to revise topics on alternate days to test what has stuck and what needs more revision.

The thought of exams looming can be scary, but whether you are taking your GCSE’s or your A-Levels, if you give yourself plenty of time and stick to our top ten revision tips, you can take the stress out of exams and achieve success.

Space

If you want to be able to revise properly then it’s essential you find a suitable space to work in. create a clear and uncluttered area in your home, preferably somewhere that you won’t be disturbed. If revising at home is difficult ask your school or college if they can provide a suitable study area

Timetable

A revision timetable is an essential tool for exam preparation. If you give yourself plenty of time you will be able to include all the revision you need to do and leave some room for that all important ‘down time’.

Write

Have you ever tried to remember something by simply reading it over and over? It’s incredibly difficult to do. Use visual prompts to help you remember what you learn, such as taking notes, making mind maps or drawing doodles that remind you of key points in your learning.

Test

Look for revision questions online or write your own and test yourself as regularly as possible. Rope friends and family in to test you too so that you get used to recalling the information you need to know.

Listen

Recording your notes and listening back to them is a great way to cement your learning and you can do it when you’re out and about or when you go to bed at night.

Guides

There are lots of revision guides available, including online revision guides. Ask your teachers which ones they recommend and follow the advice that the guides give as they’ll be tailored to the exam you will take.

Prompts

Place prompts like sticky notes around your home so you can see them wherever you are. You may not think your prompts are sinking in but recalling them could help you find the answers you need in your exam.

Help

If you are struggling with revision or worried about your progress then talk to your teachers. They will be able to offer you help and advice about what you could do to improve and you won’t feel like you’re going it alone. If you’re struggling to get motivated then team up with a friend for revision sessions.

Past papers

If you want exam success then it’s essential that you practice with some past papers. This will help you get a feel for the structure of the exams you’re taking and you won’t feel so intimidated by the real thing. You can get past papers from your teacher or find them online.

Keep calm

Being stressed out won’t help you do well in exams. Give yourself plenty of time for revision so there’s no last minute panic and practice relaxation techniques like controlled breathing to help you keep calm. To get the most out of your revision it’s just as important to take breaks as it is to do lots of hard work, so don’t feel guilty about taking time off to relax – if you plan your revision properly you’ll have plenty of time to take a break.

Image

Posted in Uncategorized |

Revision: Help and Advice

Revision

Revision is vital, especially In recent times due to huge competition for entry into college, entry into university.

You are said to earn about £10,000 more from just gaining a C in Maths and English at GCSE. This said, make sure that you start to revise early for your GCSE’s and A levels.

It is very easy to think you have all the time in the world and leave the revision until the last minute. Even looking over your notes every night after finishing homework will help you to become more familiar with the structure and content of the work that you should know in order to pass your exams!

GCSE and A level revision can be intense and studying a number of varying subjects can be difficult to keep track of so it is highly important that you start your revision early and get ready for your brain to learn and take in a lot, gradually. You will be surprised at how quickly this turns into real knowledge and is the same way a baby learns.

Do you know your learning style? If you learn well from listening then that is your learning style. Figuring out how your brain works is the most difficult part of revision. You could spend hours writing things down silently when you learn better from listening or hearing things said out loud. That’s your learning style coming into play. Everyone learns better if they know their learning style.

You could also be a hand on learner so practical activities help encourage your memory. Try all different techniques for one topic then test yourself and try to gage HOW you remembered it. Did you remember the person saying it aloud? Did you remember the revision game you played? Did you remember reading it? Did you visualise it? These are important questions to help you to find your individual revision style.Image

Posted in Uncategorized |

Getting in

Posted in Uncategorized |

Good Luck To All Our Applicants in 2012.

The dreaded UCAS deadline of January 15th has been and gone and Leaving School would like to wish all our clients the very best of luck with their applications. Hopefully all the hard work over the last few months will have paid off and you’ll all be starting the perfect course at the perfect university for you in September 2012.

Having helped a wide range of students this year, there is no doubt that competition for university places will be fierce.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , |
← Older posts
Newer posts →

Blog

ADVERTISEMENTS

ADVERTISEMENTS