My First Offer!

I got my first offer from university today! It caught me completely off guard, I usually check my email every day whenever I get the chance to see if there has been any changes to my application (this typically means that you’ve got an offer) but today it didn’t even cross my mind. It’s a massive relieve never the less, I was a complete nervous wreck every time I got an email and now I can relax knowing that all I have to do is finish this year with the grades I need and I’m off to uni!

I already went over this in my last blog but I seriously didn’t think this was something I was going to do, but that’s what has made it so exciting for me. Just because I want to go to uni I have found myself getting involved in things that I would typically avoid like volunteering and taking active interests in topics that I would have otherwise overlooked. So far the journey towards university has been a very eye opening experience and some would say it’s a way of avoiding ‘the real world’ but I strongly disagree. To me it’s a more educational method of learning to manage money and plan for the future.

I may be going off on a bit of a tangent but I’m just full of inspiration and excitement now. This is just the motivation I needed to keep pushing through mountains of coursework and revision :)

This is a bit of a short post today, I think that’s what I’ll keep doing because you guys seem to like these the most, see you in the next one!

Leave a comment or tweet at me if you have any questions!

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Applying To University (Already!)

Well guys, here we are. After a long summer of no posts (sorry guys) it’s come to that time where I have to start picking uni courses and the unis themselves. I’m not going to lie it’s a massive change for me, when I first left school uni was the last thing on my mind! But not look at me, applying for law in some of the best universities going! Without turning this into a sob story, I used to think I wasn’t good enough to go to uni. It just goes to show that our only limit is ourselves (sorry for the borderline cringy quote)

Well after a couple of weeks researching what university would be the best for me I managed to sift through about 10 to get to 5. This is the hardest part of the application if you ask me. I’ve managed to choose Manchester, Salford, BPP, Manchester Met and The University of Law. All based in Manchester, which for me is ideal because it means I can spend most of my time at uni and still come back home to see family and friends whenever I want to. I did originally plan on going to somewhere like London or Durham, but that was a step too far for me.

Skipping the boring stuff, it came to my personal statement. Wow, just wow. I never knew that having 4,000 characters could be so stressful! It seriously does limit what you have to say about yourself, because you’ve been essentially asked to market yourself to 5 universities in 4,000 characters. To put that into perspective that’s just under a page of writing. But the upside is that you have to be concise and put some real structure in there that means that you get everything you want in whilst reaching that character limit.

Having someone look at your personal statement is key. I personally think it’s a good idea to have someone who knows a lot about applications in relation to university and job applications. I had our careers adviser look through my whole application and personal statement, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Once she gave me the nod I had my personal tutor look at my personal statement. This is especially helpful because your personal tutor is typically the one who writes your reference, so this means that they can get a look at your personal statement and take some pointers for your reference. This would make you have a well-rounded application.

So this was my experience so far with my application, with a few little pointers in there. Obviously I won’t know if this works until I get offers but until then fingers crossed!

Jayson :)

Twitter - @Jayson__Knott

5 Things I Wish I Knew At The Start Of Year 12

Now that year 12 is drawing to a close I’ve found myself looking back and wishing that I knew things that I knew now that I didn’t back then.

1.    The first year of college isn’t a mess around – At first I and a lot of my friends thought that you could work moderately hard and just get through the first year on a backseat, but we were totally wrong. Luckily my main subject is a BTEC so aiming for the top grade is standard really but with my maths I did that and ended up failing my first resit. That was a wake up call and a very frustrating one too.

2.   Tutors are there to help -  For the first few months I was one of those students that if I got stuck I wouldn’t ask for help, I’d keep going at it and get it wrong all the time. It gets you more and more frustrated and it will annoy your tutors. Just ask them for help, it’s not weakness and it doesn’t make you stupid it shows that you are keen to learn.

3. Applying yourself is good – It took me quite a while to take opportunities that college put in my path. It took two presentations for me to sign up to NCS and looking back I should have done it the first time around. Now that I take whatever will benefit me, I’m on the student executive (student association, it got a ‘re-brand’ today) and student ambassadors. Both have a lot of involvement with schools and events run in the college.

4.  Free periods aren’t for relaxing – I realised that the free periods on your timetable aren’t there for you to meet friends and talk for an hour. They are there for you to catch up on work and keep productive in your day. Use them wisely.

5.   You don’t have as much time as you think – Deadlines are set for a reason, not for you to just do the work, it’s the maximum time needed for you to do the work that is set. You can’t just relax for a week and just rush to get it done the next week. Treat your deadlines like the finishing time of an exam, that extra time you have is to make sure you got everything right and to check if you missed anything.

Those are the 5 things I wish I’d known at the start of year 12.

It’s crazy to think that in 3 weeks time I would have finished my first year of college. It really has flown by and I do have a few regrets of not using my time better than I could have. But aside from all that it has been amazing and I’ve met so many amazing people and I started writing this blog. I hope I continue to write in my second year. See you in the next one :)

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Revision Problems?

The infamous monster we all know as revision. It takes up our free time, our life, makes us stressed and just generally makes most of not want to do that subject anymore. For me it’s maths revision. I do a GCSE resit in college and it is getting ever so closer to my exam and everyone is encouraging me to revise, I want to revise. But it never happens. Only recently I have actually bit the bullet and just revised. It took a lot of will power though because for some reason I’m not wired to revise.

So why am I talking about this? Well I want to get my three main triggers out there that stop me from revising just in case you have the same ones so that you can learn to avoid or overcome them because after all, revision is what’s going to get you the grade you deserve.

1)   Thinking of better and more entertaining ways to spend my time – this is the classic one. Every time that I say to myself “I better revise tonight” I think about the fact that I want to update my playlist on soundcloud or that I want to watch House of Cards on Netflix (great series by the way). So what I’ve started to do is get my parents to make me revise, and so far it’s working because they can stop me from doing these things because I used to not have enough self-restraint.

2)    Making pathetic excuses – Yet another classic. I always say to myself “I don’t have to revise this, it’s really easy and I’ll remember it anyway” wrong! Take trigonometry for example, I’ll listen and understand it one minute and the next I’ve forgotten how to label the triangle. To counter this I’ve started to think back to this and tell myself that I will forget it and its worth a little time to revise it so it sticks in my head.

3)    Becoming easily distracted – This one was a massive one for me, I could never stop looking at my phone to see what was going on or if there was another YouTube video up for me to watch. Although this was a big issue for me I found that the solution was simple. Turn your phone off.

Now I know what stops me from revising I’ve been revising almost every night now. Instead of going on my phone or Xbox to kill time I revise and I actually feel pretty good after it because I’ve done something productive instead of sitting around and doing meaningless things. My expected grade has gone back up and I’m rarely left confused on a topic in class now. Trust me when I say that this is worth it, nothing is more important to me now than revising.

I hope I haven’t left you guys thinking I’m a complete nerd but yeah that’s what revision is like for me and leave a comment of what your triggers are so others can learn from your mistakes also :)

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