The whole experience...

 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.