Advice

What is the Common App?

The Common App began as a way to simplify the college application process for both domestic and international students. It was started by 15 colleges who decided to “pool” their applications into one easily navigated application site. Today, the Common App has grown to extremely large proportions.

While there is still a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the next academic year and universities are putting together plans for online and in-person learning, the admissions process continues as normal. Or as normal as possible! 

The Ivy League group of universities in the USA – Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania,

What is a liberal arts degree?

Once considered only an option in the United States, liberal arts degrees and programmes are now offered by universities around the world, including in the UK, Japan and South Korea.

But what actually is a liberal arts degree? What do you learn and what kind of jobs could you do with one?

The lockdown owing to the Covid-19 outbreak has brought the entire world to a standstill, which was almost unthinkable in today’s world and economy. 

The academic industry, which depends heavily upon the brick and mortar set-up, has been adapting itself to the change at an accelerated rate. Schools and colleges have set up classes on Moodle, massive open online course platforms and other virtual tools.

The coronavirus outbreak has disrupted traditional teaching. Not only teaching, but university life itself.

But what about the graduate employment market, those jobs waiting for you once you complete your studies? It’s difficult to predict the long-term impacts, but a quarter of employers have already shared their plans of reducing graduate hires for the rest of the year.

The world certainly has changed a great deal over the past week, and I imagine that you might feel anxious when faced with this uncertainty. However, I hope I can offer a few words of support to help you get through it.

Keep in touch

Lecturers
This may seem obvious, but it really is key. With universities now teaching remotely, it can be even more important to clarify content or to check in if you are going through a rough period with your health.

With its outstanding natural beauty, welcoming society and globally recognised universities, it’s easy to see why so many international students choose to study in Canada.

In fact, two of the country’s top institutions, the University of British Columbia, are together home to the greatest number of international students in North America.

As soon as you wake up in the morning with the whole day in front of you, it can seem as though you have plenty of time to get a million things done. 

At 10am it’s easy to think that you will be able to read three chapters of one of your set texts, write 1,000 words of an essay, tidy your room, cook a healthy meal and go for a 10k run. But by 4pm, you find that instead you‘ve watched far too many cat videos on YouTube and have only read two pages of an article.