Cafe Uni

Recent news has shown that students around England are protesting about the upcoming rise in course fees.

The coalition Government has decided to raise students’ tuition fees to £9,000  by 2012. No fees will cost more than £9,000, but some will be £6,000, depending on the course and the student.

At the moment, the state pays a substantial amount of these fees, but from 2012, the cost will be passed to the students.

David Willetts, the Universities Minister in the UK said that this will allow for a “greater choice for students with a stronger focus on high quality teaching”.

However, people are worried that less people will be able to afford to go to university and, even if they do go, their university experience will be very different, with a curtailed social life and inability to experience university life to the full.

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University can be an expensive time of your life. Even though students can get a lot of discounts, it is also a time of your life when you are not earning much (if anything) but have an active social life and plenty of opportunity to spend money before you graduate!

It’s important to take advantage of ways to spend less money. Search for special offers for students, where you can get money off meals, haircuts, drinks and activities.

Try and get work at places that you visit a lot. For example, if you often go and see bands, you could try working at the venue and then could see the bands for free. A social life for free! Read the rest of this entry »

Once you’ve graduated and left university behind you, the temptation can be to move on and almost forget your university days.

Many people stay in touch with their core group of university friends but lose touch with the rest of the people they knew when they were a student. However, once you are a graduate, this is an important time to try and stay in touch with other alumni.

Universities often have a strong sense of faithfulness to those people who studied there, and you may find that, when you are looking for employment, you meet other alumni from the same university as you. It can be useful to still be in touch with other alumni so that they can tell you about job openings in their companies, for example, or about changes to the field you work in. Read the rest of this entry »

Just as choosing a university course can be difficult, so can choosing where you want to go to university.

However, it can be useful to think about certain things when deciding, to help you narrow down your options and make your mind up. Once you have a few options, consider talking to graduates or alumni about their experiences at that university.

Perhaps the first thing to consider, is if you want to live at home still, or live away from home. If you want to live at home, then you will have to look at universities that are not too far away, and easily reachable each day. If you want to move out, then this opens up your options even more for where you can study your course.

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Choosing which course to study at university can be a difficult decision.

If you’ve always wanted to do a particular job, such as be a doctor, then this is clearly an easier decision, as you will enter the field of medicine. But if, at the age of 17 or 18, you still don’t know ‘what you want to be when you get older’, then there are several things you should think about, when making your decision.

Most people will have a particular field in which their strengths lie. For example, you may be better at the arts, or the sciences, so this helps to narrow down your options. It’s ok to not know exactly which subject you excel it yet; most university courses are designed to be a bit more flexible so you can choose the modules that best suit your interests and method of working.

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At the moment, there are almost two million university students – and that’s just in the UK! This means there are a lot of people who are interested in university life and what it entails.

This blog will cover every aspect of student life at university, whether you are a prospective student, a current student, a recent graduate or alumni. It will aim to cover issues affecting not just full-time university students, but also part-time students, overseas students and many more!

I studied at two different universities in the UK, and I know some of the issues that students are facing today, whether it is housing, course-related problems, exam pressure, forming new friendships or simply just being away from home for the first time. I aim to cover as many of these topics related to university as possible in this blog, so please let me know what you think by leaving me a comment. Read the rest of this entry »