Mummy, I am going to get a part time job!

Away from getting on with university work, everybody may seem to have the perception of students wasting away their days watching daytime television and recovering from parties at the weekends. Of course it's tempting to live that life, but it won’t help you launch a career when you graduate unless you know a boss who will let you watch television while you work and take Fridays off. Part time work while studying offers many career benefits, even if they can add up to a heavy schedule around essay and exam time. Here are some tips for making the most of them.

Get a job to improve your skills, not just your bank balance
University life is not getting any cheaper so it's commonplace to give up a few evenings or a day at the weekend to ease the strain on the student loan. The benefits don’t have to end with your bank account getting healthier, if you can find a job that gives you experience other employers value it will be even more valuable.

Plan your vacations
Sure, you need some time away from studying, but vacations are prime periods to get more involved with work that can aid your CV. Internships normally run during the summer and Easter vacations, which may be a course requirement, or a great way to advertise your skills to a potential employer for when you graduate. You could also use a vacation to turn a part time job into a full time one if your workload permits, bumping up your bank balance and perhaps offering more responsibility.

Change your job to broaden your skills base
There is nothing wrong with having one part time job during your whole time at university, but don't be afraid to seek out a change of scene if you are getting bored doing the same thing or feel like a fresh challenge. This can really help strengthen your CV if you can build up a wide variety of skills or show progress. There are normally plenty of part time opportunities for students, although you might want to secure a new job before quitting your current one.

Don’t put paid work first
After all this, remember that you are at university to study. Employers might put pressure on you to work extra shifts, eating into time spent on course work or revising for exams. If this happens, make it clear it is unacceptable and consider leaving. They should understand a degree is more important than a part time job.

Aston Update (pt.II)

Let me start by wishing Happy Holidays to everyone!

I have been planning this post for quite a while but with the holiday frenzy overtaken my family, I have been most occupied. So let me continue...

The other major Aston happening has been the coursework submission. The second year has been copious with papers. I had to write a business plan for the Business Game Module (a total of 25 pages) and an article for the Econometrics Module (a total of 17 pages). The last week of November and the whole of December was the 'Lab Time Special' as I like to call it. The 'Lab Time Special' is a particular phenomenon which implies the 24-hour working computer labs will be full 24/7. I have seen people spend their entire Saturday sitting in them labs - no food, no drink; just a fag from time to time. We were like an army of zombies, ready to kill anyone who would stand in the way of the coursework completion.

The day of submission was the most hectic of course: people running everywhere, sheets flying around, angry mobs complaining about the queue at the Copy Shop or the non-working printers. I have even hear do of people who had had a most unforgettable day...

Mr A. encountered a very serious problem - the night before submission day he was again sitting in the cold computer labs, finishing his report; when leaving the lab he "saved" all his information on his USB stick and left; getting home he tried to open his files and guess what, "the files have been corrupted" message sows on the screen!

Poor Mr A. could not find the problem, or recover his files so he had to ask for an extension. While I was drinking wine around Christmas, Mr A. was writing his article, yet again! I hope he saved it this time!

Aston Update (pt.I)

Here is the long promised update on the Aston scene. As usual there has been so many stuff happening a person cannot even follow all the action. To be honest I feel like I have just started the term and it is already finishing.

Maybe the most stressing task everyone have found this year was the Business Game. It has been most interesting but incredibly demanding. Till now I had two main tasks in the module: a business plan and a presentation. God, I still remember the day of the presentation as if it was five minutes ago. We were all so stressed...

To be able to understand how awful the presentation was you have to know everything that happened in the previous 72 hours. The presentation was on a Thursday at 11:20. We met on the previous Tuesday to see how far we are with the whole idea of even putting everything together. Tuesday was a disaster, we found out that we were totally unprepared. We met in a computer lab in the business school and stayed there for about 5 hours trying to write our separate parts. Then we put it all together and I will be honest with you, it looked awful...

11:00 Wednesday we met to start practising the "whatever you call" the thing we put together the previous day. I found out that no one except me has ever presented anything, ever (I was so lucky to have so many presentations is my high school. Our timing was bad, no one could improvise and as a whole the idea of even standing in front of a jury the next day seemed ridiculous. We stayed together till about 10 in the evening practising an correcting, correcting and practising until finally we made it under the 15 minute limit.

09:00 Thursday, two hours before the big presentation, we started our final preparations. The previous night I had fixed the slides themselves and everything was starting to look good. Then a new problem arose: we were too fast and seemingly were just speed-reciting the whole thing. Two hours later we seemed to have narrowed it down to 12 minutes, which was still quite bad, but still a solution. Going last, I had the task of slowing down as fast as possible and winning us some time, which was quite easy; I did not have anything prepared and was just talking freely about my slides. I could extend my 5 minutes to whatever I was asked.

11:10 Thursday. While we were waiting to be called into the room the atmosphere outside was unbelievable. You could easily cut the air with a knife! The group waiting with us was supper ambitious and unbelievably competitive. Then about 5 minutes later the groups that were before us came out and said and I quote: "They are going to eat you alive!" and "Good luck!" with a nasty smirk on their st*** self-obsessed face. My group sank, oh, poor guys, they had done so much work the days before. I looked the the annoying group leader right into the eye and I told him: "We don't need luck, these guys are more prepared then anyone in the university!" Literally, a second later we got called in...

The Jury was of five people: one representative of Lloyds, one representative of Accenture, two people from the Aston Business School and my Business Game tutor. The time in there passed in a glimpse of an eye. We seemed to be over so fast and then the questions came. We got asked the two nastiest questions in the history of presenting!

A week later we found our result - 67%, not too shabby but still, for all the work we had put in, unbelievable low. This week I found out that they had cut points for the most ridiculous reasons! It is true what they say, when there is a jury, there is unfairness!

..to be continued

Placement Adventures # 9 (en ultramar)

en ultramar - n. oversea (Webster Spanish-English Online Dictionary)

I was planning to stop the placement adventures for a while and continue with university stuff but I just cannot drop one of the most fascinating job offers in the Aston Business School Placement Website.

I have been discussing so many different parts of the application process and the different opportunities and the help you can get but I have never mentioned the possibility of going abroad or as called in the ABS website "overseas". Partly, because I have not considered doing a placement in another country, I have not searched or encountered any information on the mater until this week; and there is PLENTY!

There is one inportant thing one must decide first - does he/she want to work or study? Does that sound odd? Well, if you go overseas you could study in a different university for a year. Some of the locations I remember are Austria, USA, India, etc. On the other hand if you want to have a "placement" placement you can chose from some of the adds. Please note that I am only discussing regular students like me, not students studying a language or planning to go abroad from the start. It is high time I got to the point.

While I was browsing, bored, in the library I found a job add that was offering a placement with "company X" in the Netherlands. That just sounded so exciting. Now I am almost ready with my application and will be submitting it tonight.

If anyone is looking for adventure and excitement, check the available placement (or exchange) abroad!

Placement Adventures # 8 (Wywiad)

wywiad - n. interview (Polish - English Dictionary www.dict.pl)

After months of waiting and 7 Placement Adventures today I just got my first interview invitation. One of the "X companies" saw potential in me! Evidently Placement adventures # 8 will be continued soon. (15th January)

to be continued...

Placement Adventures # 7 (изпит)

изпит - n. test (Bulgarian-English Webster Online Dictionary)

The Online Assessment is definitely not what one would expect, or at least, not what I expected. Here I will try to describe in detail the whole process so that you are
all prepared.

As most of the placement adventures, this one starts with online registration it is definitely a comparatively fast process, though. After the registration you enter into your own account. In my account there were four tests - two practice tests and two real tests. They were divided into two basic categories: logical and math.

1/ The Logical Reasoning Tests (LRT) started with a practice test of 5 questions. I have to say they were terribly easy. The actual or as they call it "main" test was 24 questions for 12 minutes and some of them were so difficult that I could hardly be sure of the answers.

Here is a website that could help you: www.kent.ac.uk/careers/tests/spatialtest

Here are some examples of questions:

The Answer here is C


The Answer here is D

2/ Numerical Reasoning Tests (NRT) were much harder. There were 5 practice questions, which I have to say were not too hard, some basic calculations. The main test was 20 questions for 20 minutes and the questions were so hard; the last four questions I, literally, just clicked to not leave empty!

I am fairly certain that for some people the online assessment is going to be a piece of cake while for others it is going to be extremely challenging. You cannot do with it, bu you can not do without it! As far as I am concerned, what is left for me now is WAIT FOR THE RESULTS!