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Category: Advice

  • What I Wish I Knew Before Attending University

    What I Wish I Knew Before Attending University

    Hi! This is Jami and Ben – both fourth year students who attend Brock University. We decided to sit down and collaborate on a list of things we wish we had known before coming to university in the hopes that we can help future university students avoid the frustration and disappointment associated with finding out crucial information a little too late.

    1. Attend campus tours – This helps you to get familiar with the general location of important buildings and departments. It also helps you to know where your classes are so that your first day is not so overwhelming.

    2. Become best friends with your course/program calendar and academic adviser – Program guides are usually available online or as print copies at your university. These documents are useful in ensuring that you meet your degree requirements, but also typically give a list of courses along with their respective descriptions – use this to make sure your courses/program interest you! Your academic adviser can help make sure you are on track towards completing your degree, can provide assistance if you aren’t sure your program is right for you, or can offer you guidance concerning which courses to take – and more!

    3. Visit your Career Centre – We cannot stress how lifesaving a place this can be. From general job search help (including resume and cover letter assistance) to grad school information and career planning, your school’s career centre can help you when making difficult career-related decisions.

    4. Get involved – This can be done in a variety of ways and we suggest doing as many as you can! First, attending your orientation day/week events can help you get comfortable with your new environment and can answer many of the questions you have. Second, join a club or co-curricular activity, such as a mentoring program or students’ association in order to meet new people, provide you with networking opportunities, and make you feel more integrated into your university community. Third, volunteer or intern in your spare time – this looks great on a resume and can make you feel great about helping others! Fourth, attend career fairs and events in order to find exciting opportunities for part-time, full-time, career, abroad opportunities and more!

    While this list is not exhaustive, these are things that we did not think to do until later in our university careers, so we feel like we missed out on some great experiences and are now trying to catch up! Take our advice – ask questions, get involved, get informed. It will make your transition from high school to university much smoother and will aid in making your transition from university to the “real world” a lot easier, too! Good luck!

  • How to Handle Competition

    How to Handle Competition

    Competition.

    You are going to deal with it at every stage of life. Whether you are applying for a retail job at the Gap, signing up to be a summer camp counsellor, applying for a job at your neighborhood Taco Bell or even applying to university or college, you will face competition.

    Competition is a good thing, depending on how you look at it. Competition allows an employer to pick the very best person out of all the people applying for a given job. Competition allows an admissions committee to choose the brightest student out of the pool of applicants applying for a particular university or college program.

    On the flip side, competition means that the more people applying for a given spot, the tougher it will be for any one person to get that spot. Often times, there is only one or a limited number of spots available which everyone seems to be fighting for. (This is the part most people don’t like about competition!)

    Interestingly, there are some people who thrive on competition. To these people, the thought of competing among other individuals for the same spot drives them to be the best of the best. It pushes them to excel farther beyond their potential. It pushes them to improve so they stand out from the rest.

    Other people, however, find competition daunting and even debilitating. The thought of so many individuals vying for one or a few spots scares them so much that they may not even bother to compete. They may also feel that the competition is far better or has much more to offer than they do, so they worry that they aren’t good enough and bring themselves down. If you fall into this group, rest assured you aren’t alone. There are a lot of people who find competition nerve-wracking. Since you can’t avoid competition (it’s part of life, after all), here are three tips that can help you handle it better:

    1. Forget about the competition — This may sound crazy to you at first, but hear me out. Focusing on who your competition is can sometimes negatively affect you and bring you down. Don’t think about all the people applying for a job at the Gap, for example. Instead, focus on you and what you have to offer to the Gap store manager.

    2. Do the best you can — The key word in this statement is “you”. Everyone’s best will differ. Don’t focus on trying to be better than someone else – it can be stressful and hard to match. Instead, focus on being the best you can be. For example, do whatever you can do to be the best applicant for the camp counsellor position this summer or to be the best candidate for the college/university program you are applying for.

    3. Keep pushing forward — If you got the job or university/college spot you were applying for, then great! If you didn’t, that’s okay too. Unfortunately, you can’t win them all in life. Every successful person knows this. Every successful person also knows that it doesn’t mean you stop trying – you have to keep pushing forward. Apply for a job at another retail store or fast food outlet, apply to another school or apply next year to the same program. Always pick yourself up and keep pushing forward!

  • Two Jobs Are Better Than None!

    Two Jobs Are Better Than None!

    My first year of university officially ended on the 21st of April and the time arrived for me to finally think about getting a summer job. As I am an international student with a ears almost as big as my fiscal expenses, I would need to work at least 65 hours per week in order to cover my tuition for the coming school year. That is the equivalent of working one full-time and one part-time job. Now, who would have thought that going to school was the fun part of the year?!

    Luckily, I had already landed one job at a certain casual Canadian restaurant; the second job came soon after at a local convenience store thanks to the efforts of a well-built network of friends. The first thing I was grateful for is that both the jobs I landed required the same base skill set. I worked as a cashier at both the restaurant and the convenience store and my job required me to do the following tasks on a day-to-day basis:
    1) Take customer orders
    2) Manage any and all numerical transactions
    3) Talk to customers and solve their problems
    4) Clean the restaurant/store from time to time
    5) Do not spill anything on the boss’s pants( one of my co-workers had the unfortunate pleasure of doing so)

    Much to my surprise, I had mastered the base skill set in under a week without much difficulty. My first job had me working mostly overnight shifts and, as bad as it may sound, it was actually the ideal situation for me to work. This is because I would work from 11 pm to 7 am every night (or day; honestly working overnight really messes up your perspective of time), go home, have breakfast by 8, take a 2 hour nap and go to my second job (which would start at 11 in the morning and would go on until 3 pm).

    So the days passed and I continued with my daily exploits. I will not lie to you – it was hard. But the work itself was not bad and I enjoyed most of it. I made some great friends and went through some very hilarious experiences.

    So here is my final pieces of advice for anyone who wants to make the most out of working two jobs:
    1) Find two jobs that essentially are similar in nature and require the same basic skill set. Doing so will allow you to improve on those required skills and perfect them.
    2) Find jobs that are close to your house. Doing so will save you a long commute to work and will also save you time that you can utilize to do other things – like sleep!
    3) Make the most out of every situation. As clichéd as this may sound, it does work. Try and make new friends at work. Broadening your horizons will also widen your network of contacts that may help you later in life.
    3) You do not want to physically and mentally over-exert yourself. If you cannot handle two jobs then it is better to just have one. You will avoid making mistakes and potentially being let go from both your jobs this way. Instead, focus your energy on looking for scholarships/bursaries/loans to help pay for school. Also, ask your employer for help as many companies have educational benefit plans for student workers.

    Working two jobs is a strenuous task but it is possible. So if you find yourself in a situation like this sometime in the future then hopefully you shall remember my advice for you!

  • Doing Scholarships the Right Way

    Doing Scholarships the Right Way

    Like getting a ton of free money? Of course you do!

    Those lines might sound like the beginning of an un-reputable online advertisement, but the truth is there are plenty of scholarships aiming to do just that – hand you free money to support your education.

    So how do you score some of this free cash? Start by applying to any and all scholarships that you can. The more you apply to, the higher your odds of receiving an award.

    If you’re not sure of your eligibility for a scholarship, apply anyway. Many scholarships are not given out due to lack of applicants. Even if your eligibility is hazy you may be the lucky winner by default. This was the case when Sandro Rocco, Niagara College Photonics alumni, applied to the Walker Technology Grant.

    “I wasn’t entirely sure if I qualified but I thought – why not give it a shot? A lot of people don’t bother,” he commented.

    “It turned out I was the only person to apply for the scholarship so I won. The award was really helpful and got applied directly to my tuition,” Sandro continued.

    Some students shy away from scholarship applications because they feel their grades aren’t high enough. However, plenty of scholarships are handed out as a result of achievement in other areas, including extracurricular involvement, athletics or charity work. Financial aid and area of interest are also taken into consideration when handing out scholarships.

    Take time out of your schedule to make great applications. Prioritize and spend time on scholarships that are most applicable to your skills and experiences.

    Remember that scholarship application is not limited to your first year of studies. Many students stop applying after their first year thinking that the majority of scholarship funding is reserved for new students. This is not the case, as many awards are reserved for students in their second, third and fourth year of studies.

    Students are sometimes intimidated by the amount of work involved in applying to scholarships, but by using an incremental approach and developing decent time management (yes, it is possible) you will be able to handle the stress and hopefully reap the benefits of scholarship application.

    Many online scholarships allow you to save your work in their own word processors, making it easy to finish one or two parts of the application at a time.

    Having a stock application template done in advance is another easy way to save time and minimize stress while scholarship hunting.

    Have a thorough list of your skills, past experiences, awards and academic achievements on hand as part of your application template. This go-to list will make a world of difference in the quickness of your application process.

    Also, prepare a general and flexible essay that highlights your personal qualifications and that can be tweaked to fit specific scholarship criteria.

    Keep your audience in mind when filling out applications.

    If you are applying to an academic scholarship, be sure to use academic language and keep the tone of your writing as professional as possible.

    In contrast, some scholarship review panels are looking to see a more personal response. For these, don’t be afraid to use a less formal language and be sure to highlight your own opinion, giving judges a better understanding of your personality.

    Just like that summer job, it is never too early to start the search for scholarships! So good luck and happy applying!

  • University = Show Me The Money?

    University = Show Me The Money?

    During your first year of post-secondary education, you might feel like you have a chorus of administrators telling you to SHOW ME THE MONEY! This is probably the least awesome part of your university/college experience, but don’t lose hope! You can pay for your education and still have some dough left over if you manage your money.

    There are some great resources for student loans and scholarships that you can check out, but for now I’m going to share the best money-managing tip that’s saved me some moolah over four years of university.

    Some students may want to work during their first year, while some might prefer having more time to focus on their studies and soak up the university/college atmosphere. Either way, you’re going to want to have some extra cash handy to buy food, clothes, video games, hovercrafts, etc. The best way to make sure you’re not broke by October 1st is to…

    MAKE A BUDGET
    …and follow it! You could aim for a monthly budget, a weekly budget, or something in between. The disadvantage of the monthly budget is that you might get to the end of the second week and realize you don’t have enough coffee coins to last until the 31st. However, the monthly budget is advantageous if you KNOW you are responsible with your money and your self-discipline is strong enough to withstand the barrage of media which daily tells us that we need more stuff.

    Since I am personally quite fond of stuff, I went the way of the weekly budget and it worked fairly well. The disadvantage of the weekly budget is that it could be Monday and you’ve spotted a pair of jeans that you simply MUST have, or the new Halo game just came out and you’re not sure you can live without it. In cases like these, you might be tempted to dip into next week’s budget or blow a month of your carefully pinched pennies. Borrowing from one week’s budget to pay the expenses of another week is acceptable as long as it doesn’t happen too often and you’ve got legitimate reasons. Sometimes you might have to talk yourself out of that cute new top (everyone else is going to buy it anyways) or the pair of nunchucks you thought you just HAD to have (what are you ACTUALLY going to use them for?)

    If the personal pep talk doesn’t work and you decide you absolutely have to have something, just remember: you must eat (canned spaghetti for dinner every night does not count) and you must pay bills (interest rates are killer and cell phone companies are not as forgiving as their cute little mascots make them appear.)

    Here are some things to consider when making your budget:

    • The contents of your bank account!
    • Do you have a meal plan or will you be buying groceries?
    • Will you be working throughout the school year and how much will you make?
    • Do you have job plans for the summer?
    • How will you be paying for your next 2/3/4 years of university or college?
    • Are you eligible for or currently receiving financial aid? (Remember, loans must be paid back. Try saving a percentage of your money to put against your loan so that you don’t finish school and fall into a pit a debt.)

    Don’t be too generous with your budget or you’ll run out of money, but don’t be too strict either because you have to live on more than bread and water rations! Keeping the above six things in mind will help you to structure a budget that should work for you AND your bank account.

    Happy saving! (more…)

  • Learning to Cook!

    Learning to Cook!

    When you’re busy with essays, homework and final projects, sometimes you forget that there are great life skills that most schools do not teach. One of them is cooking. Whether it’s to cut down costs, to impress a date or just for your own amusement, cooking is something you’ll always be glad you learned.

    It’s easy to start – just pick a simple meal that you like. It can be anything: soup, spaghetti, mashed potatoes, eggs… You already know how to make a sandwich, but grilling some of the ingredients can make it extra tasty and once you know how to do it, it won’t take very long. If you’re feeling ambitious, pick your favourite meal and see if you can make it. Ask people for help. Someone in your family will probably love to give you a few tips and walk you through some recipes. If not, pick up a cookbook or find a recipe on the internet. It can be hard at first, but it can also be a lot of fun if you’re willing to learn.

    Whether you’re moving out for college this fall or you’ll be at home for another few years, now is a great time to start cooking. When you get to college, it’s expensive to eat out even if it’s just one meal a day. You can stay home and make Kraft Dinner all the time, but that gets old pretty fast. You’ll save so much money and feel a lot better if you learn to make things yourself. Once you know how to make a few meals, you’ll start to pick up some general techniques and you can start to substitute things and add the spices that you like. Before too long, you’ll start to have your own cooking style and specialties.

    If your cooking style involves more than peanut butter sandwiches, it will be a really great tool for impressing people. If you start dating someone who comes over to your house, think how stunned they’ll be with a casserole or a homemade soup or whatever else you want to make. And it doesn’t just work for dates! Every time you have a party, you can buy a bag of tortilla chips and some canned salsa or you can make your own salsa and guacamole. There’s nothing wrong with canned salsa, but it’s a great feeling to have people eating and complimenting something you’ve prepared yourself.

    The best reason of all to learn to cook is that it can be a lot of fun! You might set off the fire alarm once or twice and that’s always stressful, but it will be worth it. It’s easier to get going now when you have the time to learn than to get thrown into an apartment one day with a pan and no idea what to do with it. So just start making something you like. Offer to barbeque for your family or work on perfecting a batch of cookies. Once you start to cook, you can only get better!

  • Social Media: An Employer’s Reference

    Social Media: An Employer’s Reference

    Pretend, for a moment, that you have never actually met yourself. You are an owner of a prosperous dog-sitting company that has a reputation for serving customers with the highest level of professionalism. You market your company with the promise that every dog will be cared for by responsible, respectful employees who will give the dogs the very best of care. Because of that promise, you attract many loyal customers and you try to take extra care when you hire new employees so you find someone you can trust who will be reliable and mature enough to do the job. When you receive a number of applications from students who want to work for your company, you immediately go online to try to learn more about the potential candidates. When you Google your name, what kind of information do you find?

    The term “social media” refers to the ways in which people create, share and exchange information and ideas online and through networks. It’s a form of social interaction that more and more employers are tapping into to get a sense of who the people are that are applying to work for them.

    Now return to your present perspective and think about what you have shared online. Is your name attached to the photos of you dancing on the table at last weekend’s huge spring break party? Is your face recognizable in the video your friend posted of students who are underage and under the influence? Such images might cause an employer to immediately throw out your application. That’s why it’s important to construct your online presence with care and make use of the privacy tools that many social networking sites provide.

    Here is a list of five of the most popular social media websites used by many students and a brief explanation of what they offer:

    Facebook: Allows users to create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange private and public messages. Facebook currently has over one billion active users.

    Twitter: A micro-blogging site that enables users to send and read “tweets,” which are little text-like messages that cannot exceed 140 characters. Twitter has over 500 million registered users and generates more than 340 million tweets a day.

    LinkedIn: A social, yet professional networking site for people in professional occupations. LinkedIn has over 200 million registered users.

    Pinterest: A pinboard-style photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage image collections according to a theme of their choosing. Pinterest has about 12 million users and is growing fast.

    Instagram: An online photo-sharing and social networking service that allows users to take pictures and instantly apply digital filters to them. They can then share the finished product with the 90 million other monthly users.

    These are just a handful of hundreds of other sites that share information in similar ways and provide your potential employers with a chance to judge you based on what they see online. It’s time to refine your online presence and ensure you are presenting the best possible picture of yourself to the world.

  • Stress Recognition and Elimination

    Stress Recognition and Elimination

    Dealing with stress can be a struggle between light and dark, between hope and despair, and between what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes we are provoked by an event or a situation that creates an upsetting condition called stress. Stress is when we feel tension or pressure, as if in a dilemma. This condition can be easily remedied, however it does take practice to be able to fully overcome the stress.

    Recognizing stress is the first step, and this skill can be developed over time. Often it can be developed simply by saying out loud, “I am stressed out right now”. Being able to recognize your emotional state allows you to see your condition more objectively and to take a step back so that you may help yourself. There are always solutions to stress, and being able to pull yourself out of it is one key way of ensuring your overall happiness and well being. As we age, this skill of overcoming stress comes more naturally. However, it often does have to come from a devoted effort at recognizing and understanding how simple stress is to overcome.

    In extreme cases, there are conditions of stress that result in a psychiatric diagnosis of anxiety. This is often the result of an imbalanced brain chemistry, severe family tensions or severe anxiety-provoking situations like having been in a war. This condition is impressively frequent, with one in four Canadians having an anxiety disorder over their lifetime (anxietycanada.ca, 2013).

    In most cases, anxiety can easily be relieved by becoming conscious of when one is anxious or stressed and focusing how you can overcome the condition. Some people are soothed and made at ease by familiar things, familiar people, and familiar foods. Other people need to practice certain routines that put them back into a good head space. It is very important for people to identify things that make them feel good and to know that stress can be relieved by simply utilizing those de-stressing things, people, foods or routines. Sometimes, however, people can abuse this formula by resorting to things or foods that, as a by-product of their de-stressing effect, create secondary effects that are undesirable. This situation is commonly found among people who resort to drugs, alcohol or gambling to relieve their stress. This is called maladaptive coping because, instead of creating a relief from stress, it a major secondary effect like addiction or becoming overweight.

    It is important, when creating a stress-relieving formula, to choose a solution to stress that has positive side effects! Positive options for stress relief can include lighting candles and taking a warm bubble bath, exercising, taking a nap, talking to a friend or family member, making a healthy and nutritious meal, relaxing with friends, writing, reading, watching a favorite show or movie, and so much more. There are many ways to positively eliminate stress, so start practicing ways that work for you!

  • Advice on Advice

    Advice on Advice

    Choosing an educational or career path is difficult, especially when you try to do it alone. But asking for advice can sometimes make things more confusing. When asking for opinions, it’s important to know what – and who – to ask. This guide will help you to collect the kind of advice that will help, not hinder, your decision making.

    1. Think about who really knows you best. You might automatically think, “Mom!” or “Grandpa Joe!” – but that may not be the case. Loving someone or being close to them doesn’t automatically mean that they know you best. Does your Grandpa Joe see you the way you are, or the way he would like you to be? He might think you’d make an amazing mathematics professor when, really, you can’t count and love ballet.

    2. Consider why people make the suggestions they make. Does your Aunt Louise want you to be an orchestra musician because she knows that you love to play violin; or is it because she never realized her own dream of playing in a symphony? Make sure that the suggestions you get are tailored to you, and not to the person suggesting them.

    3. Interview people and ask work-related questions. Ask people what they do (or did) and find out what their jobs were like. Ask family members about their jobs – why they chose them, what they like and don’t like, or what a typical day looks like. People are your best resource: don’t be afraid to ask around to get a better idea of what field might most interest you.

    4. Do your homework. If you already have an idea of what you’d like to do, research it before asking opinions on it. If you’d like to work in accounting, you may not want to ask the opinions of your performing arts family members unless you’ve done a bit of background research. People often react to jobs that they think are “boring” or “difficult” without considering whether or not they’d be right for you. Doing research can also help you when asking questions about other peoples’ jobs.

    The right advice can help you to make a career decision that you feel good about. The wrong advice, on the other hand, can do the opposite. The most important thing to remember is that at the end of the day, the only person doing your job is you. Your cousin Fred may love you, but he won’t be coming to work with you every day. Take advice with a grain of salt; use it to inform your decision making, but remember that your decisions are yours to make.

  • Life After High School

    Do you ever think about what you plan to do when you finish high school? Maybe you want to work right away or maybe you want to continue studying. For the first time, you’ll be making decisions that could affect you, your family, and your friends for the rest of your life. You can’t control everything in your life, but you can make a plan that will help you to enjoy whatever you do and to have a fulfilling life.

    You might expect that life after graduation will be completely different from your life in high school. For some of you, this might be true. You might decide to get married or to move to a different country or a different city. Suddenly, you’ll have to make your own decisions about your future, and even if your parents help, you’ll be responsible for your own life. You’ll be an adult.

    For at least the first while, your new freedom might seem very exciting. If you decide to go out and get a job, the freedom of having money might be a lot of fun. You might decide to get a job right away working in the retail or service industries. You might decide to go to university to become a doctor or teacher or go to a vocational school for a career in a trade.

    If you choose to work right after graduation, you might find that your job is a lot like high school. You’ll have to get to work on time and stay for the whole day unless you have a special reason to leave. If you miss work too often without a good excuse, you might lose your job.

    If you choose to continue with your education, you might find that your instructors pay little attention to whether or not you attend classes. You could attend only the first and last classes and still get good marks. However, you’ll still have to take all of the tests and complete all of the assignments if you want to pass the course. The professors likely won’t watch over you the same way teachers do in high school, but they’ll still expect you to get your work done.

    One thing that will likely stay the same after high school is the types of people you meet. Whether at work or in university, you’ll find the same mixture of friendly or unfriendly people, helpful or unhelpful, tense or relaxed. You will probably also remain much the same. Different situations might bring out skills and interests you never knew you had. However, your basic character will probably remain unchanged. That’s why it’s important to begin thinking about not just what you want to do, but what kind of person you want to be.

    Does life after high school sound like the kind of life you already have or like an exciting adventure that is opening up? In the end, both of these possibilities might be true. Use this opportunity to be everything you’ve always wanted to be.