The Guide to Going to Uni Part 2: Friends like These...

 Some of you may have noticed that the update schedule has become a little more erratic recently; this is due to my finding it a lot harder to adapt to a working day than I thought I would. The result of this is that I will now be updating the blog on friday nights or- more likely- saturday afternoon and we may lose the second update a week- it will certainly become more infrequent. I apologise for this but at the moment I just don't have the time or energy that I need to maintain our original schedule. In the meantime keep enjoying our guide to university!

Picture by glennharper via Flickr

The most important thing you take away from university- and the thing you worry most about before you get there- is friends. A good group of friends can make your university experience into the best years of your life and can lead to lifelong bonds, so it is not surprising that one of our biggest worries when starting university is "will I make any friends?".

The answer is almost certainly yes- I don't know of anyone at my university, however bizarre or eccentric they seemed, who wasn't able to find at least one kindred soul to share their time with. That doesn't mean that you wont have to make an effort and it does take some people longer to form bonds or to adapt to socialising in the university environment. It can also take some time for your friendships to solidify- often the problem in freshers week is that you have too many 'friends' and you don't yet know who will be the best fit for you long term. Sooner or later the mass of people will settle into groups to which you will be attached to varying degrees of acquaintance-or friend-ship.
If you are harbouring concerns about making friends however, there are steps you can take to be more active in your socialising which will improve your chances of finding people you click with.

 Accommodation
First year accommodation is randomly assigned at university which can sometimes lead to a 'you can pick your friends but you can't pick your family' type situation. More ususally however you will find your closest friendships develop within the confines of your hall of residence. Nothing brings people closer together like collectively managing to burn pasta, leaving razors in the shower and wandering around in your pyjamas at three in the afternoon, after all.

This means it is worth making an effort to meet your neighbours during the first few days: if at all possible, keep your door propped open (fire safety bedamned) so that you can see people as they pass by- and of course they can see you too. It's also important to remember that the normal rules of British reserve do not apply during the first week of university. So its perfectly ok to knock on people's doors to introduce yourself and ask people to do things with you like walk to lectures or go on a sainsburys run. Make the most of this etiquette amnesty to meet as many people as possible; the more things you have going on and the more people you have around you, the less chance you have to feel lonely or homesick. Also, hang out in communal areas as much as possible- put the TV on in the common room or put your shopping away loudly and slowly in the kitchen. Try and spend as little time as possible in your room on your own in the first week: sleep and solitude are for essay deadlines.

Clubs and Sports
The alternative to finding your friends through proximity (accommodation or lectures) is to search for likeminded souls by joining clubs, societies or sports teams that take your interest. These range from the mainstream (languages, drama and major sports), to the fringe (Sci Fi appreciation, Anime and Ultimate frisbee) to the jokey and bizarre (the naked club, winnie the pooh appreciation, punt jousting). Whatever your fancy you can bet there will be a cavalvade of characters good and bad awaiting you at mixers and practices. It is fun to do this on top of meeting people 'at home' because it a. broadens your pool of potential friendships and b. means you actually leave your halls of residence for reasons other than food and alcohol. It also gives you a chance to meet people from other years, subjects and halls of residence.
There are two important things to remember about meeting friends through clubs and sports: firstly if you do decide to make a commitment stick to it for at least a term unless you are completely miserable. Attend all practices or meetings and socials possible in the first few weeks as this will be the only initial opportunity you have to get to know these people. Its much harder to maintain a friendship based on a mutual interest when one of you is no longer pursuing it.
Secondly, make sure you start seeing people outside of practices; friendship can't really properly blossom once or twice a week. Ask people over for a drink or go out for coffee etc and get to know them outside of the interest you share.

Above all HAVE FUN! Making friends at university is not supposed to be stressful and it won't be if you give people a chance. Good luck to all of you this week and have a great time!

The Guide to Going to Uni part 1: Money Matters

We interrupt our regular programming to bring you a special announcement… its fresher’s week again. Not all at the same time but over the next few weeks, the next generation of drunken slackers bright young minds will be heading off to uni.

Now of course this guide usually focuses on the emergence from University not the entrance, however with student numbers at an all-time high in an effort to escape the fee hike there are thousands of teenagers in desperate need of our sage counsel- and who are we to deny them?

So the next few posts will provide a three part guide to going to uni that should ease the transition from home to away and answer any questions or worries felt by the freshers of 2011.

The biggest change when you leave for university is arguably the sudden acquisition of financial independence. How much you get and where you get it from may vary but for the first time you will have to consider the costs of food, rent and in some cases even utilities. Whether you’re by nature frugal or extravagant, this will necessitate some lifestyle adjustments.

Spreadsheet Love

Photo by Kikishua via Flickr

The first thing you need is a good spreadsheet; it doesn’t have to be overly complex but some record of your income and expenditure will help you set a realistic weekly budget and enable you to make the decision about whether or not to pursue an additional line of income (and by this I mean getting a job not drugs or prostitution by the way).

If you are an excel virgin you can get a parent or more knowledgeable friend to set one up for you and explain how it works- make sure your balance and total outgoing are linked to the data you are inputting so you get a real-time update of your situation when you add new information. This might seem overly geeky or control freaky way of overseeing your finances but once you have it all set up it will require minimum effort from you and will ensure you always know where your money is going.

An addendum to this is to make sure you have your internet banking set up and that you know all the necessary codes and passwords for accessing it. This will allow you to check your account Balance any time of the day or night and give you access to statements so that if you get behind on your spreadsheet you can easily find the information you need.

Photo by sausyn via Flickr

To Work or Not to Work?

Not all universities allow their students to work but if you are faced with no such restrictions you will probably have given thought to the possibility of eking out your meagre income with some kind of part time job. However, it is worth putting off your decision about this until you are a couple of weeks into your timetable as this will allow you to gauge the amount of time you will have free and the academic workload you will have to shoulder.

It might seem like money is the most important consideration but if your work and social life are negatively impacted than you may want to reconsider. Remember that going to university is about getting a good qualification and meeting new people; if you’re not getting either than why are you paying out all that money?

If you do decide to get a job try and fit it around your university life: if you have few lectures look for jobs with early morning or late night shifts, leaving the afternoon and evening for work and socialising. If you have morning lectures find evening and weekend shifts so you can still see your friends and get work done.

You can also try and find a workplace that fits with your schedule: working in a library will allow you to merge work and study, bar work will let you socialise with your friends during work and after as will working in a coffee shop.

Whatever work you decide to do make sure you confine it to a maximum of three or four days a week to minimise the negative impact on university life.

Photo by Eun Byeol via Flickr

Food, Glorious Food

Buying food will eat away (no pun intended) at your weekly budget unless you take control of your spending right from the start. There are many ways to cook on a budget (these will form the bulk of a future post) but here are a few of the simplest and most effective.

Firstly, buy dry goods (such as pasta and rice) in bulk and take advantage of multibuy offers on canned goods. Both of these groups of products do not go out of date and are essential for most recipes, so a larger initial expenditure can save you a lot of money in the long run.

Secondly, don’t be a food snob: people on a budget don’t have that luxury. So buy the basics option if there isn’t much difference in quality and look for cheaper cuts of meat- chicken thigh fillets taste just as good as breast fillets but cost half the price.

You can also save money by cooking with friends: cooking for four (or more) usually lowers the price per head. If you take it in turns to cook the cost of the more expensive ingredients is shared by the whole group and food doesn’t go to waste.

Finally go shopping at night- expensive things like ready meals, meat and bakery products get severely marked down in price the night before the expiration date so a certain flexibility can save you a lot of money.

Do you REALLY need it?

The last piece of advice I have for you is regarding the ability to distinguish between essential and non-essential purchases. I know everyone’s human and we all give into temptation- I myself once lived for a week on £15 due to the inadvisable purchase of a pair of gorgeous shoes (for the record totally worth it). However, the point is I did then rein back my spending, I didn’t just carry on regardless. Too many people these days are happy living in their overdraft or on their credit card- I am terrified of the latter and only do the former when I know I have money coming in.

Obviously you shouldn’t deny yourself a pair of new hole-free jeans or some underwear but that doesn’t mean that you need to head for Levis and Agent Provocateur when New Look and La Senza will do the job.

Yes its unfair that some text books cost more than a designer handbag, but one is a necessary purchase and the other is a luxury (hint: the necessary one doesn’t come with a shoulder strap). So next time you’re out shopping and you spot a ‘lust have’ item be realistic about what you can afford.

Then go home and put it on your Christmas list.

If you’ve got any questions about managing your money or any handy hints you’d like to share let us know in the comments section. Join us next time for part 2: making friends.

Changes

Just a quick one today. The blog is undergoing a redesign, so there will be a few changes in the next couple of days. Please bear with us, and tell us what you think!

Mind the Gap- minimising the transition between uni and work

Photo by honeyjew via flickr

Photo by bezajel via Flickr

Apologies for the latest post being up a day late however I started work this week- as will be evident from this thursday's post- and as a result am tired. All. The. Time. Despite this I have still found time to gift you all with my thoughts and feelings on the first week in a new job. Enjoy!

Tomorrow will mark the end of my first week in the working world, a world that is very different from the university life that proceeded it. In honour of this momentous achievement, this Thursday’s post will focus on dealing with the differences between life at university and life at work. Some you may be aware of, some you may need to prepare yourselves for, either way I hope this will be an educational guide to understanding and minimising the gap between student and worker drone.

Getting Up Early: as a student you may have occasionally had to get up early (or what you thought was early) for lectures and supervisions but generally you set your own hours, especially if you studied for an arts degree. If early did occur it meant getting up for something scheduled at nine meaning that you seldom needed to get up before seven. When you go to work you have to get up ‘early’ everyday, only it doesn’t count as early anymore it just becomes ‘the time you get up’. The average commuter gets up around 6-6:30 and those with long distances to travel will get up even earlier in order to make it to work on time.

This means for the first week (at least) of the uni-job transition you will be very, very tired. There are two main ways to combat this: 1. Go to bed early at least for the first few weeks – this will give your body the rest it needs to adjust to the new schedule. 2. If you can, the week before you start work, reduce the time you get up at by an hour/half hour (depending on the disparity between the two schedules) every morning leading up to your first day so that when you start, your body has already had time to start adjusting.

Not Having Any Friends: this is not something I had considered being a problem but after four years of building friendships at university suddenly you find yourself starting from the beginning only this time the people you’re trying to make friends with aren’t the same age as you and they’re not in the same boat: unless you join a company through a big graduate recruitment scheme, you will be one new person in a group of people that have had at least a year to work out who they eat lunch with and what they have in common. From my own experience, the majority of people I work closely with are middle aged women with school or college aged children; they are absolutely lovely but their conversations are generally about the things they have in common which unfortunately are generally not something I can relate to. So no matter how friendly or helpful or welcoming your new colleagues are, it is likely that at least a few times during your first week you will end up feeling lonely. 

This will probably pass but in the mean time there are a couple of things you can do to make yourself feel better: firstly, up your contact time with your friends. With Facebook, Twitter etc there is little chance of truly falling out of contact with people you no longer see every day but make sure you get enough real time contact: try and meet up with friends on the weekends, grab some face time on Skype, give them a ring or even send them a good old-fashioned letter (this will be discussed in more detail next week). Even better, if you have a friend that works nearby make plans to have lunch, giving you the chance to break up the working day with a chance of scene. Alternatively you can put your efforts into making friends: take an interest in people, engage them in conversation and you might discover you do have things in common, age notwithstanding. Search out people closer to your own age and experience in the organisation as well if you are trying to discover common ground – you may feel more at ease trying to befriend someone you feel comfortable reminiscing about those drunken halcyon days at uni with.

Feeling Out Of Your Depth: Logically you know you’re capable of doing the job: the interview process and competitive job market leave little room for erroneous appointments. However, few graduates these days go into a career that makes direct use of their degree- the phrase ‘transferable skills’ looms its ugly head. Yes you are capable of the work being required- you just don’t always know how to produce it. Admittedly the start of university evoked a similar sense of inadequacy and confusion but after your first essay wasn’t sent back to you via the medium of a cross cut shredder your working style adapted fast and panic was more about completing the work on time than any worries about how to do it or what to use. It has taken me four days at work to sort out all my passwords and get to grips with the ICT system, on top of the work I am supposed to be doing.

To tackle this make sure you ask lots of questions and take extensive notes: few people will object to a barrage of questions in the first week and most will be happy to explain or demonstrate how things work (like the photocopier for example) and this will not affect their opinion of you or your abilities; after all they were all new once too. However, if you don’t make a note of procedures and end up asking a second or third time you will find people’s good will- and their good opnion of you- considerably diminished. Another strategy for dealing with this is to try and find a mentor within the company- this relates back to point two about making friends- who will be happy to act as your guide to the workings of the organisation over a more extended timescale. This minimises the people who are inconvenienced by your questions and inexperience and gives you a more secure relationship which should make you feel happier to ask questions however simple.

These are just a few thoughts on my first week at work. If you are in a similar situation and have found my advice helpful or have thoughts of your own to proffer, please let us know in the comments section below!

The Guide to Workwear part 3: Medicine a la Mode

Picture by Walt Stoneburner via Flickr

Welcome to the third (and for the time being final) installment of our guide to workwear series that looks at the appropriate clothes to wear when working in a hospital or surgery. This piece was very kindly provided by Louise, a fifth year medical student, who has managed to make room in her busy schedule to give you all her advice on how to dress as a medic. Wherever you are in your medical career, this is an essential read to ensure your appearance matches your qualifications!

Dressing for work in a hospital is all about managing to look stylish while still being practical and abiding by the infection control rules. You have to remember that patients expect a certain level of appearance from their doctor, and are likely to make judgements about your competence based on what you look like- nobody wants a doctor that looks like they’ve just crawled out of a hedge or has been sleeping in their clothes. As a result, ironing is a must: you don’t want the patient’s first impression of you to be that you were too disorganised to iron your trousers when they need to trust you to make decisions about their health.

An easy way to dress smartly with minimal effort is to have a wardrobe of tops and bottoms which you can mix and match from. Keep it simple when it comes to trousers and skirts; go for blacks and greys, and team them up with brightly coloured blouses and tops. Blouses are a lot more effort to iron than tops made of stretchy material, so I’d go for these, although you need to make sure that they’re not too tight and clingy- it encourages patients to make inappropriate comments, especially in A&E on a Friday night!

A couple of things that I would recommend avoiding:

1. Anything long and dangling- you never know what it might trail in!

2. Tops with necklines that gape when you bend over to examine a patient- you’re supposed to be inspecting their chest not vice versa!

Unfortunately, the bare below the elbow policy doesn’t leave too much scope for keeping warm in the winter, but there are ways around this problem. Although they are hard to find, especially if you’re shopping in winter, short sleeved cardigans do exist. Vests can be layered under shirts although this can backfire if you end up on a very warm ward (removing a vest is obviously not something you can do at the bedside!) Tank tops are another alternative.

As for shoes, comfort is everything. Hospital floors are unforgivingly hard on the soles and as you’ll be walking miles every day your feet will thank you for investing in good quality, sensible shoes. A more expensive, better quality pair of shoes will also last far longer before they show signs of wear or become misshapen.

One final word of advice:  don’t buy an orange stethoscope- they clash with everything!

Thats the end of our guide to workwear for now! If you are in a career not covered yet and would like some advice or fancy writing a post giving advice to others in you field drop us a line at literateblonde@gmail.com or let us know in the comments below!

The Guide to Workwear part 2: Teaching in Trousers

Picture by Tinker*Tailor loves Lalka

Welcome to part 2 of our workwear series aimed at those of you starting in the education sector- whether public or private, training or teaching. Some of you may recognise Hannah's name from the great guest post she wrote for us earlier this year (read here if you missed it). Hannah is starting on the job teacher training at a primary school this year but has been working in schools for a while now and is amply qualified to provide advice.

As a primary teacher you have to be smart, fun, practical, professional, fashionable (you’ll get the girls’ respect for this) and comfortable all at the same time, which can be hard to achieve!

 I will be starting my in-school teacher training very soon and so I have had to purchase a teacher’s wardrobe. The key is finding the right trousers. They have to fit all the above requirements, excepting the ‘fun’ one perhaps, as your top can do this all by itself. I found a gem pair of trousers in New Look (so I bought two pairs). They are black (practical, smart), with a tapered leg (smart and fashionable), turn ups (fashionable) and a reasonably (but not too) high waist (fulfils all the requirements). 

However, they’re perhaps a bit, how do I put this... manly-looking.  So the top becomes important. Just choose what suits you, but make sure it’s bright, fun and pretty. And definitely not low cut- as a teacher you’re always bending over to have a look at children’s work and you don’t want any prepubescent boys having a peek down your cleavage. Cardigans are must too, but please not granny style. If your top is patterned, wear a plain cardigan, if your top is plain you can get away with a patterned cardigan. Avoid floral patterns though; you’ll end up looking mumsy not professional.

Shoes should something plain and simple with a quirk, like a bow or a flower. But make sure you can clean them of drops of PVA glue and smears of paint, so avoid patent or suede. I would also wear flats, unless you find heels exceptionally comfortable.

If you're already in teaching and would like to add your advice to Hannah's or if you are just starting out and would like some sartorial advice please feel free to comment in the space provided below!