Earn While You Learn?

More and more students appear to work part-time whilst at university but for most students it is for financial reasons and not to gain relevant experience for future employment. Many students find work in high street shops, bars and restaurants and some in more office based roles.

It is advisable to try and obtain a job in a relevant area to your degree but this is not always possible and it appears that experience is increasingly not the priority. Laura Howard wrote an article in The Guardian quoting, "An estimated 792,000 full-time UK undergraduates - two-thirds of the total - will have to spend valuable time away from their academic work to earn cash not just to survive student life but to deal with the impact of inflation on rising rents, food, household bills and travel."

It is not just term-time work that students are looking for either as The Guardian states, "Research published last week by Halifax also showed that almost half the students surveyed (41 per cent) said they now worked over the summer as well as holding down a term-time job, while 18 per cent held down two jobs or even more."

Do you have to work part-time and/or during holidays to survive your time at university?

Read Full Article from The Guardian

Have your say - journalist seeks student views for article.

Kate Hilpern (Journalist) is looking for students to interview for her article. See her message below for more details...

Following this week's news that people are increasingly naming their parents as their agent on their UCAS form, I am working on an article for the Guardian newspaper on parents' growing involvement in their adult offspring's lives. Some accompany their son or daughter to induction day; others go to careers fairs with them; some go to job interviews; others call up their offspring's employers. I'm interested in talking to people whose parents have a strong involvement in their lives. The purpose is not to criticise the trend - indeed, many people welcome parents' growing interest and see it simply as a reaction to how friendly we are with our children these days. Others find it a bit suffocating. I would welcome hearing from you by email - with a view to interviewing you on the phone before Wednesday, when I have to write the article. Please contact me at KHilpern@aol.com

Going through Clearing?

Clearing is a process of matching applicants with courses and enables over 30,000 people every year to find a place on a course. People may use Clearing if they have not withdrawn an application and hold no offers from any courses due to not meeting the requirements, declining offers or applying late.

So, how do you ensure you find the right course through Clearing?

The University Blog recommend Ten Top Tips.

UCAS provide advice on how to apply for Clearing and your options.

There is also some useful information in The Independent

University of Oxford plan to boost admissions from poorer students

Oxford and Cambridge Universities are the top universities in the UK and therefore the hardest to get into but is it just the grade requirements that it make it so difficult? Apparently not as a study carries out last year showed that students from top private schools were twice as likely to get into Oxford and Cambridge irrespective of their A-level results.

To move away from this elitist reputation Oxford will try to boost admissions from from poorer students by identifying their postcodes.

The Telegraph states, "In addition to looking at a candidate's postcode, Oxford will also collect four more pieces of "publicly available" information - the performance of applicants' schools in both GCSEs and A-Levels, whether a pupil looked after or spent time in care, and it they attended specific programmes for disadvantaged children. Candidates who are flagged up in three categories out of the five - and are academically strong enough - will be guaranteed an interview at Oxford, although not necessarily an offer."

The Telegraph found that the decision has been met with anger from educationalists.

What are your thoughts on this?

Is the credit crunch affecting University choice?

At this time of year students are making those final and vital decisions on where to go to university. There are many factors that influence their decision such as the course, the university rank and the location but is this rise in rent affecting their choices?

accommodationforstudents.com shows that students can expect to pay nearly £40 more a month on rent than 4 years ago and it is predicted to increase due to the credit crunch and The Guardian discusses the student rent increases further.

Has the credit crunch affected your university choice?

Lowest Graduate Unemployment for 5 Years!

According to BBC News Graduates have the lowest unemployment rate for five years. There appears to be a trend of those graduates with the lowest degree grades having the worst unemployment rate and also computer science and creative arts graduates having the highest unemployment rates.

What are the reasons for this reduction in unemployment? Are there more employable graduates in the market or more graduate employers or both?

Read full article

Should your research start at the library or Google?

An interesting post was made on The University Blog discussing whether using Google as an information portal for research helps or hinders students. Many students use Google for all of their research and although this allows access to thousands if not millions of sources it is argued that it is still one entity when carrying out research. Does Google provide too much information and should students stick to the literature stored in the library?