Blogs

Domestic student: Divya Advani

Diwali has always been a special day. At home, my house is filled with the smell of gulab jamuns (Indian sweets), the colorful rangoli (abstract patterns painted on the floor)  and the beautiful diyas (candles). It is a day that I look forward to celebrating every year with my family and friends. Since I have come to university, I have had to spend some Diwali’s away from home. Some students, like me, may feel especially homesick on this auspicious day.

Lauren Bell, Cosi Care 

Cosi Care is a business that focuses on helping families manage skin disease. Approximately one in five children have eczema and 15 million people in the UK have it. This figure has tripled in the last three decades. Itching is one of the main symptoms, and when children scratch their skin it makes the condition worse and can lead to permanent scarring and infections.

Himmy Lee, biomedical sciences 

I had not been planning to study abroad for my undergraduate degree when I was a secondary school student. So when my family decided to give me the opportunity to study in the UK, I was excited but also nervous. I was only 17 years old, and there were many things that I was uncertain about. 

Student mental health is at the forefront of many minds – in particular today, World Mental Health Day.

Last week, Fika, creator of the student emotional fitness app of the same name, published research revealing that 96 per cent of UK students believe that adding “emotional education” modules to the university curriculum could help to reverse the student mental health crisis.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has everything you would expect from a university – research opportunities, a broad range of courses and many student clubs. What I love most about Caltech, though, is the feeling of trust and community that arises from the unique intensity of the academic system and the honour system that applies inside and outside the classroom.

Each academic year at Caltech consists of three quarters, or terms, of 11 weeks each.

September 20th 2019 will surely be remembered as the day when the world united in one of the largest global climate protests. Thousands of people across Australasia, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America stood together in the fight against climate change. And school and university students were at the core of this protest.

Inspired by the teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg, students and academic staff staged protests outside their university buildings against the ever growing issue of climate change.

This is for all of those students who are deciding and preparing to go on a year abroad. 

It’s the kind of gap year in your degree that isn’t really a gap year. Universities will handle study abroad in different ways, but my university (University of Leeds) offers you three options: find an internship of your own choice, find a university and study, or work in a German school as a foreign language assistant in English. I chose the last one. 

With a growing number of funded programmes and the promise of a CV boost, students are increasingly choosing China as their first choice study abroad destination. 

How you treat your first year is a point of contention among university students.

For the majority of courses, your first-year grade does not count towards your final degree classification. Naturally, then, students start to wonder whether a year focused on socialising and getting stuck in with societies – fitting in the occasional stint at the library – will be much more beneficial than going all out with studying.

As long as you pass with 40 per cent, you can put the effort in next year when it counts, right?

According to my parents, I have always been an ambitious individual.

My late father was probably the one who encouraged my desire for entrepreneurship, as he was a businessman and hoped that I would follow in his footsteps. It was from him that I learned that you ultimately decided where your life will be in 10 years’ time, right now.

At 14, I started my first business as an in-house personal tutor working with my classmates and peers, teaching three or four students biology, chemistry and physics each week.