Since the beginning of the academic
year I have improved my skills as a student, I became more aware of how
university essays and presentations need to be structured and how important is
the referencing and bibliography, as an important part of any essay that makes
the difference between plagiarism and copying someone else’s work.
Regarding the Thursday lectures I have learned
about different quotidian issues: such as sustainability; how this matter is
covered in our university and how it can help to reduce the carbon foot print,
also how to project this matter to our daily lives and future businesses. The
human rights laws lecture as very convenient due to our human rights essay,
violence against women and girls, also a topic that interested me a great deal.
Also the lecture about “stress” in a
student life offered great information about how we can control it in a daily
basis, and additionally, if we are international student’s things can be even
tenser, and the university have counsellors that can provide us help and
orientation. Overall, the topics are current, and assist us to develop our
skills in note taking and summarise the talked topics, preparing us to future
lessons.
About the study visits I have made two:
one was a trip around Oxford which taught me more about the history of the
city, and the second one was to the Pitts River Museum which has a vast
collection of artefacts and other objects, that gave us the opportunity to
contemplate and learn more about cultures from all over the world.
Overall, my experience has been very positive,
all the context of “Orientation to University Studies” gave us the opportunity to
develop research skills, due to the essays we had to make, prepare us for
future lectures where we have to take notes and summarise topics, tips about
how to interrupt a lecture to ask questions or disagree on some topic, analyse texts and be aware of the authenticity
of the sources, and more importantly, we learned about the value of
bibliography and referencing which is a key part of any essay. I can affirm now
that I understand these processes much better due to our experiences and the
essays we had to plan and present. About my challenges, as an international
student, were the language and the understanding of how the British academic
system works, and all of these was covered during the semester.
I believe this module provided me the
essential tools for my future semesters in Brookes, elucidating me about the
importance of time management to achieve deadlines before time and how the
academic system works. I was surprised that we had to make so many blogs, but
at the end of the day I truly learned more about my university – the JHB award
winning building and how the library and the Dewey decimal system operates.
Moreover, I was very surprised with
the help provided by the counsellors, the subject librarians and the weekly
emails concerning new job vacancies.
Furthermore, I was very happy with the quality
of Brookes buildings and his installations, for instance, how every classroom
has his own computer and projector, and how the access to a computer is
relatively easy, and how our student number is so simply useful to all
university accounts.
