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Five mindsets for designing your life
I’ve just finished reading Design Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It takes the principles of design thinking and uses these to help build your career. It's a great read, and whatever stage you are at in your career, if you feel things aren’t quite going to plan, I’d happily recommend it.
And for those of you who are in the process of making your university choices, there are five basic mindsets in the book that you can definitely apply to your university search.
So, today I’ll look at each of these mindsets, and how you can use them as you research and make your university course choices!
Is it OK to apply for two different subjects through UCAS?
It's that time of year when loads of students are finalising their UCAS choices, and a question consistently asked of advisers is “Can I apply for two different subjects?”
Well, as with most things about applying to university, the answer is “it depends…”
But what exactly does it depend on?
10 ways to work out if a university and course is the right fit for you
Choosing a course and a university is a tricky business.
In this back-to-basics article, I suggest ten things that you should definitely be thinking about as you make your choices.
From campus life to teaching style, accommodation, cost of living and careers, we look at the essentials of finding your best fit course.
No regrets: How to choose the right subject to study at university
Nine out of 10 graduates would choose to do an undergraduate degree again if they could, with just one in 10 saying they would choose not to go to university if they had their time again.
Around half of the graduates say they’d choose the same subject.
But… four in 10 say they’d prefer to study a different subject.
This is according to brand new research by the Policy Institute at King’s College London.
That’s 40% of graduates who wish they’d studied something else, and 10% of graduates who wish they hadn’t gone to university at all!
Is “Find your passion” really a good way to choose a course?
It’s advice that is as old as the sun: “Find your passion, and you’ll never do another day’s work in your life”.
Or when you are heading off to university “Choose a course that you are passionate about”.
But, most careers advisers nowadays would say that such advice is deeply unhelpful. It creates the expectation that every young person should have found their passion. And since most of you simply haven’t found your passion while still at school, it just creates unnecessary pressure on you. Which in turn just makes you freeze; unsure of how to progress and how to choose what to do next.
However, perhaps there is something to be said for working out ways to explore your potential passions; how to find challenges, industries, and roles that might feel more like you are making a difference, and less like you are doing a job.
So how can you go about exploring what yours might be?
BSc, MA, MBChB? I’m so confused!
Whenever I hear a university presentation in a school, I am struck by just how much jargon we use. Listen to any presentation about studying Medicine, and you’ll hear them talk about MBChBs as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
The reality, of course, is that while a select few people know that an MBChB is shorthand for a degree in Medicine, the number of people who know what it actually stands for is vanishingly small.
If you are one of those people, you have no need to read any further. However, if you are currently starting out your search on UCAS and are finding yourself baffled by the weird and wonderful array of degree titles and wonder what they all mean, this article is for you!
Falling in love... with learning
It’s nearly November, and those of you in your final year at school will be right in the thick of it with your university application process. You might be super-organised, and have applied already. You might be finalising your Personal Statement and refining your final choices. Or you might just be taking the first baby steps towards working out what on earth you are going to apply for!
Whichever stage you are at, you are not alone; there are thousands of others in the same position.
All of you (except a few super-human students), will be going through the same doubts: Am I doing the right thing? Is university for me? Will I enjoy the course? Will it be worth it?
And so now is actually a really good time to ask the essential question of yourself: Why go to university? And in particular, why are you looking to apply to university?
How to avoid becoming a drop-out statistic
OK, so I really don’t like the term ‘drop-out’, but I wanted to get your attention, and ‘non-completion rates’ or ‘students leaving their degrees’ just didn’t cut it as a headline. I promise I won’t use it again.
But here’s the thing… recent data released by the Student Loans Company has revealed that the number of students who are not completing their degrees is on the rise, up around 28% over the last five years. (See this BBC article).
This is not good.
In human terms, that’s nearly 42,000 young people who left their degrees last year uncompleted, carrying with them their student debts, and doubtless a whole load of other unwanted baggage.
Careers, courses and ikigai
I, along with many westerners, first came across ikigai as a career decision-making tool; a Venn diagram with four overlapping qualities in the ideal career: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. I’ll come to the Venn diagram in a minute, as it’s brilliant, but I would like to start with an explanation of what ikigai really means to the Japanese.