Blogs

As a Filipino student pursuing an Erasmus Mundus master of arts in public policy, the Central European University (CEU) has provided a perfect balance of academic inquiry, career development and socialising.

I am consistently encouraged to ask about my fellow students’ life stories, as they have such different experiences to my own. And I find that this is helping me to make better decisions, both as a student and as a future policymaker.

Youth turnout in UK general elections has declined significantly in recent decades. More than 60 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in the 1992 election, compared with an average of about 40 per cent since 2002.

Youth turnout in the UK is among the lowest in Western Europe. For example, about double the proportion of young Swedes vote in national elections. The problem is particularly apparent among young people of low socio-economic status. Only a quarter of those who leave school with no qualifications vote, compared with three-quarters of university students. 

Top universities with the best student-to-staff ratio

Jikei University School of Medicine in Japan came in at number five in the Times Higher Education 2017 table showing the universities with the best student-to-staff ratio.

I joined the doctoral programme at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology in 2013. I came to know about UNMC from an alumnus, Dr Mahek Sharma of the BMB department. I was interested in pursuing my doctoral degree in a medical centre, and UNMC seemed to be the perfect fit for me.

Some celebrities have always taken an active interest in the education of their fans by setting up foundations and scholarships to fund university tuition fees. However, a new trend has emerged: fuelled by the connection between celebrities and fans on social media, young people have been directly asking their idols to contribute one-off payments towards their college costs.

More than half of the world’s population uses the internet and social media users have increased by 21 per cent since 2015, with 2.8 billion users reported globally in 2017.

When trying to understand the potential influence of individual universities for the general election we decided to take into account several factors: the student population by constituency in the 2011 Census, the number of UK students in a university, the location of university campuses, and how close the result of the 2015 general election was.

I was eager to make the best of an exchange semester in France by integrating myself into the Toulousain lifestyle. My exchange college was the Institut national des sciences appliquées de Toulouse (part of the Federal University of Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées).

My journey to the American University of Sharjah (AUS) was a complicated one. 

During the semester before studying abroad, I took a choir class with a professor who previously taught at AUS and worked with a choir he created in the UAE. I made friends in that exchange, over Skype, who studied at AUS, and who ultimately convinced me to come here.

Coming to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) in 2012, after graduating from high school in Toronto, Canada, was my first time coming to Europe. I never thought that I would find a place as culturally diverse as Toronto, but I was proven wrong when I came to RCSI.