Since starting TheUniversityBlog, I used a dark theme. But after using Google Reader to check out about a million different feeds and news sites, I liked to see things with a brighter background.
That’s why I’ve now changed the theme.
What do you think? Any thoughts? If you preferred the previous theme, let me know. I can always change it back, of course!
But I hope you like this one. Slightly more flexible for navigation too, methinks…
Christmas has a different meaning for different people:
What meaning does it have for students?
If you take a sensible view, Christmas is a time for students to do the following:
Whatever year you’re in, the Christmas break is a very good time to look at the time spent so far. You won’t be in the thick of things. Even if you remain on campus during the hols, most others won’t be, so you have a great opportunity to ask yourself some questions and get an understanding of where you’re at.
Freshers/1st Year/Level 1 – How has the new life changed the way you think, the way you live, the way you view the world, the way you want to be? Have you felt a good balance between your work and your social time? Do you have any wishes, any regrets, any need to improve?
2nd Year/Level 2 – Pretty much halfway through your degree now. Do you feel stable? Are you ready for more? Do you have the control to push yourself further as the degree gets deeper and more focused? Have you given the work your full attention, or do you need to knuckle down from now on?
3rd Year/Level 3 – How is your Final Year Project going? Is your research totally focused now? Do you have specific goals based on your previous two years of study? What else do you want to achieve before your time at uni has ended? Do you want to continue your academic study at Postgrad level, or are you planning various career moves?
Once you’ve taken stock, as suggested above, there’s no point in leaving it at that alone. Bring all your thoughts together and note down what you want to do for the rest of the year and beyond.
If you’ve got goals, you’ll get a lot further if you have a plan of getting from A to B…
As school children, Christmas was a big celebration. In the world of work, Christmas is a couple of extra days holiday. For anyone at university, Christmas is a strange situation.
There’s no denying that university equals a lot more than just doing work. Of course, this blog has a lot of study tips, but the secret to a successful time at uni is to use it with every possible part of your life.
So when Christmas comes along, you no longer have the nightly events, the parties, the tens/hundreds/thousands of friends on hand to do something at the last minute, or the fun community spirit that shouts “holiday camp” as opposed to “study area”.
At a time like this, I would suggest a period of relaxation. You’ve been granted a few weeks to recharge your batteries, so get recharging! Then you’ll be more than ready to burst back onto the scene in January.
Relaxing doesn’t mean you stop revising…
You’ll probably have exams looming when you return to uni. Obviously you’ll be spending some of your break on revision, but many students are fooled into ignoring the revision until they get back. You may have a week back at university where you’re meant to be back from Christmas and working toward the impending exams/essays that are due.
Rather than wait for the allotted uni-time for revision, make a point of spending very short bursts of time during the hols on getting up to speed. It’ll boost your confidence. It’ll also give you the chance to find out what you already know and let you focus later on what’s important.
You’ve suddenly been given some time away from the (by now) norm. That means it’s the best time to sort out what you’ve got and get rid of all the crap.
I mean it. Spring clean like it’s, erm…Spring! You may have started uni with a million items, of which you’ve used less than half of the stuff.
If you’ve had lots of junk gathering dust, make a decision about what you’re going to do with it. Throwing it away, selling it, leaving it at home…it doesn’t really matter; just do something with the junk.
The same goes for your notes, photocopies and degree materials. It’s now your chance to get everything into a nice order, get rid of the unneccessary overspill, tidy up any important notes you’ve made, and take control of what you’ve got.
Yes, it’s been a while. Here are some good old EduLinks to keep you going. Happy reading!
Time – 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007
[Lots of American focus, as you’d imagine, but I’m a sucker for this kind of thing.]
Open Culture – 28 Podcasts That Will Teach You French, German, Italian & Spanish
[To get the most out of learning a language, get used to listening to the language. While it’s great to listen to radio stations and watch TV shows over the net, Open Culture have put together a load of audio learning podcasts. After listening to these, you’ll be more than happy to listen to the radio in whichever language you’ve wanted to learn.]
Jonathan Fields: Awake @ The Wheel – Top 10 ways to un-bake your brain
[My ‘Enjoy your study more’ article on Tuesday mentioned some similar ideas. As this article explains, life can make us feel a bit low and unhappy. So whether or not you’re studying, there’s always reason to enjoy yourself.]
Chronicle of Higher Education – Yale Uni Puts Complete Courses Online
[There’s so much available to students now. If you want to go that little bit further in your study, you’re spoilt for choice. Now Yale has put up some of their courses for anyone that’s interested. Astronomy, English, Religious Studies, and lots of subjects beginning with the letter ‘P’…something for everyone hopefully!]
LifeHack.org – We Ask, You Answer: Advice for Recent Grads
[Readers of Lifehack offer their ideas and advice to graduates on how to work the future to the max.]
The Road Map – How to Start a Conversation in 10 Easy Ways
[For Freshers, it’s now been well over 2 months of getting installed into the university way. Enjoying yourselves? I hope so. Even well into your degree, it’s still necessary to speak to new people and get involved in conversations. That can be quite intimidating sometimes. The Road Map offers some tips to getting the most out of new conversations and beefing up your confidence when going about it.]
The M.A.P. Maker – 25 articles on networking for shy people
[Moving on from starting conversations, university is a great place for networking. Make sure you go beyond networking with just students. Network with as many people as you can. Even if you’re shy and couldn’t imagine much networking, you MUST be able to find a few pearls of wisdom from this mammoth list of articles.]
Online Tech Tips – Web sites that work offline thanks to Google Gears
[One of the next big things tipped to make a difference to our lives is the ability to use online tools while you’re offline. Back in the day when the Internet was related more to bulletin boards than the World Wide Web, I would download all my messages and forums from a slow dial-up modem and reply to everything offline. Once I’d finished, I’d log back on and upload my responses. The offline way gives us much more flexibility. Well, that’s the idea anyway.]
New York Times Magazine – Year In Ideas Magazine
[If nothing else, this will get your mind whizzing in all sorts of directions. Let it wander for a while. Who knows where it might take you?]
Improving Your World: Relationships – Tips for improving communication with family and friends
[In a nutshell, stop looking internally and start listening to and understanding others. But if you want to delve a little deeper than that, there’s plenty of help in this article.]
Life Optimizer – The 80/20 Principle: 11 Ways to Boost Your Life
[A fab post. Although the focus is on general life, it’s a good student checklist too. I could have done with some of these thoughts when I was a student myself…]
Study Hacks – 25 Articles Every Student Should Read
[While Cal is on holiday (lucky thing!), he’s highlighted some writing that will ‘change the way you think about being a student’. He’s very kindly recommended one of my recent articles too, bless ‘im! So if today’s EduLinks aren’t enough and you’ve missed my regular dose of linkageness, this list should be more than enough. You’ve never had it so good!]
Do you, as students, take part in any kind of protest? Do you think it makes a difference? How do you see change occuring? What are the major issues that would cause you to get out of your seat and protest?
Today on the Guardian’s Mortarboard Blog, the NUS president, Gemma Tumelty, discusses how students are more politically savvy than ever. While some people believe students are ignoring issues, Tumelty believes that political stands are now taken over “individual issues according to their conscience, rather than falling back on blind partisanship”. I agree that individual issues play a much higher part than concerns of the past, but I don’t think this is as positive as Tumelty does.
And it’s unfair to refer to ‘blind partisanship’, because it suggests an unimaginative coming together just for the sake of it. I think there are simply more causes thrown at us, resulting in a dilution of what matters and what we can cope with. There are only so many hours in the day…
It’s hard to publicise anything as the biggest deal now. People want to judge what’s important for themselves.
So with each year that goes by, a growing number of concerns compete for our attention. University has long been a place where anything is possible, but this overload of possibilities doesn’t allow large scale political protest to take place effectively.
Tumelty does end her piece by suggesting that students still protest in large numbers, but that the protests go beyond students and are attended/used/run by people from all walks of life.
To my mind, this further highlights the dilution within culture. With university taking on greater numbers of 18+ year olds, it’s no wonder that they are no longer the specific group of yesteryear, but a blending part of society that takes a place with all adults in the UK.
It wasn’t that many years ago when student protests over loans and fees were a big deal. Yet it didn’t make the difference hoped by many, and some commentators at the time said it was a huge blow to the effectiveness of student protest. Still, I must admit, such an important topic didn’t stir the emotions of as many people as it should have done. I was there and a lot of students treated it more as an annoyance than as something worthy of protest. Luckily, there were still plenty who did want to be heard, especially after students felt the government had backtracked on promises that had been given. Nevertheless, positive results were not particularly forthcoming.
When I was at uni, a large group of us living in halls were involved in a payment dispute that caused a deal of upset. I tried to get a protest going and was in discussion with staff as high up as the Pro-Vice-Chancellors. Despite the clear problem that needed addressing, everyone gave up on the problem after the initial effort was unsuccessful. I ended up being the ONLY person who wanted to stand up to what was right.
If being upset and losing money are not enough to rile everyone into action, what on earth is!?
I singularly took things as far as getting an admission that things could have been dealt with better, as well as an apology for any upset caused. At this point, nothing had been offered to me, but I was in a good position to demand further action. So did I?
No, I didn’t.
You see, I loved my uni and I felt that I’d made my point. They had respected me and taken me seriously, which was great. You might think I was mad to get as far as that, just to draw a line under the whole thing at the last minute. But it wasn’t of interest to the rest of the students any more.
I had got what I wanted and there was nobody else left with an active complaint. If we’d all pulled together in protest, we would have felt a strong reason to carry on. But that didn’t happen.
So what exactly is student protest now? Is it protesting about something whilst happening to be a student? Can it involve a single student, a handful of them, or all the students in the land? Does my experience belong to ‘student protest’? Do the words ‘student protest’ matter any more if the issues regularly involve society as a whole?
Tumelty refers to the recent Facebook campaign that led to HSBC reversing its decision to charge graduates interest on their overdrafts. But becoming a member of a Facebook group isn’t difficult and doesn’t mean the members necessarily even had an account with HSBC. While I don’t believe the protest led to ‘blind partisanship’, I don’t think it’s sufficient comparison to a hard-hitting student protest of grand proportions. Yes, the students won in the end, which is great news. It also led to major news coverage. But I’m still left pondering over what ‘student protest’ is.
What would you define as ‘student protest‘?
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