Bye Bye Birdies

After reading my degree at York, it's time to leave. It's been the best three years of my life. I've really come out of my shell and have so much confidence to take on the world. I've met loads of amazing and different people and immersed myself in a culture far removed from normal life. Indeed the university bubble will be one that will prove difficult, if not practically, then emotionally and sensibly.

York is a city apart from most other university towns in that it has the highest concentration of ducks, geese and wildfowl on the university campus. It's an interesting experience to begin with; skirting round inquisitive geese and being hissed at and accosted for a sandwich when they see you eating. This constant exposure to them develops into a deep appreciation for
the birds, going about their business.

Birding about
They don't fade into the background either, their behaviour sometimes throws up some real laughs when they're chasing each other, or running from some breeze-animated paper or plastic bag.

A really funny story was when a barnacle goose (you get good at your ornithology in York) was pecking at a discarded apple in the middle of a grassy quad. A much larger canada goose clocked it, and ran over, chasing off the other goose, decided it couldn't eat the apple then walked away again. All over in seconds but it makes you look again with a cocked eyebrow.

The silly avian behaviour presented itself down by the river Ouse when, during breeding / gosling season, there were many families of geese about and one parent goose decided to chase another family of geese away. It ran and hissed at the other geese, gaining a lot of speed. It slipped on the smooth pavement and fell over then ran away again. This actually caused me to laugh out loud.

Taken to heart
You can easily become to accustomed to this kind of unexpected behaviour with a kind of paternal endearment and I'm sad to be leaving this behind. It's not just me who sees a fondness for the wildfowl there are many people who work in the award winning campus media who take the animals to heart (York Vision, Nouse and the Lemon Press). Derwent college (York operates a collegiate system akin to Warwick or Oxford) prints T-shirts with duck related humour and the library gives out duck book bags as competition prizes. There is a strong feeling on campus toward the animals. I'll miss them but for me, the lure of new adventure presents itself and I'll grab it with both hands.

The secret lives of birds are just a simple, humourous example of one of the quirks of going to university and living in an area with lots of wildlife. It's one of the things you miss out on if you live at home in suburbia and commute in to study and miss these little moments.

I'm really looking forward to getting some good quality me time over the summer holidays before getting on with my master's course in the September. Please comment with your fowl histories.

Write a better life story

Ever felt so angry and impotent that you stand there fuming or rage-walk around the house, banging and slamming as you go?

Another way
Try writing. Nothing in particular, just sit, take out your notepad and write. writing about how you are feeling and what's wrong at the time is not the way to proceed here as this will just end the exercise as a short essay on expletives. Try to take a step back in your mind and consider your situation as a whole, homing in on the good. The idea of this exercise is not quantity, or quality but distraction from the thing that angered you and crystallisation of the good points of your life. Even if you were right to be angry, being so can cause you to make rash decisions which you regret later. By jotting down in a note-pad, you can focus your energy into writing and not raging, this will help calm you down so you can think clearly. This will allow you to deal with your problems much more rationally.

Exercise
Taking 20 minutes a day and doing this exercise should also help you feel more centred and less prone to raging. The exercise works by acting as a tap, through which, all of your stored stresses and aggression are released upon the page. As you're doing it with no particular direction, your hand will write what you actually feel so you'll have a better guage of how you're feeling instead of the usual mantra of "you're fine. I'm fine, everything's fine". This mantra is the least helpful thing to think of in a stressful situation as it simply delays the crash. By writing, you 'defuse the bomb' and bring the real you out on paper.

Health Benefit
I'm no doctor or psychologist but it doesn't take much common sense to realise that by regularly releasing stress on paper, as one does through sport and gym training, one can help avoid stress related illness. This will help you feel better and more productive at work and you'll achieve more in the work arena. By emptying your mind, your brain will be more still. This will allow you to see the truth of what matters to you in your life and you'll also be able to see more clearly as you de-clutter your life. Not just this, as you'll be less occupied with stress all the time, you will see a change in your outlook. Your world will become sunnier and you'll be less likely to take rain or other minor things as a personal assault on your being.

Potential Future Career
And who knows, as you engage in a daily writing exercise, you train the mind and the body so you may get a taste for writing and this could lead to a part-time writing job, bringing in extra pennies or you may write the best work for 50 years.

health

Puncture repair guide (with tips!!)

Hisssssssssssss!! The angry sound of a puncture. Don't let it ruin your ride and don't waste money on a guy from Halfords to change your inner tube either. In this blog article, we'll be looking at puncture repair for bike inner tubes: the motivation, some tips and general installation instruction.

Hiss Bang Groan

Firstly, you need to identify the type of puncture you've got and this will allow you to tailor you approach to the repair of the puncture. A low hissing sound implies a snakebite or pinch puncture. This is a puncture which will slowly bleed out the air from your tyre and will have two small holes in the inneer tube. This is more minor damage and you may even be able to
ride home on such a puncture so you can fix it there more easily. A fast, loud bang is a rupture and is more serious. It implies a blowout of your tyre and may mean that you can't fix the puncture by the roadside.

Getting started

So you've identified your puncture and which wheel of your bike is afflicted. What now? Well,
firstly, you want a set of spoons, also known as tyre levers (not the eating iron variety). These should ideally made of tough plastic and are available from online stores such as Chain Reaction Cycles and Ribble cycles. Chain Reaction has free delivery on all purchases so it's worth giving them a look.

Use the more spoon-like end of the tyre lever to lift the rim of the tyre over the wheel rim. You may want to use 3 tyre levers for this to lift the tyre off the rim all the way round one side of the wheel.

Now pull out the inner tube. It's as the name suggests, a rubber tube, usually black and it sits under the tyre in the wheel rim. If you have a minipump to hand, pump some air into the inner tube and listen all around the tube for a hissing if you cannot already see the puncture. Many pinpoint punctures are very difficult to see so hearing and the feel of the airflow against the finger tips can help you locate the puncture.

After finding the puncture, use a puncture repair kit. My favourite at the moment is the Rema TIP TOP TT04 Sport mini puncture repair kit (~£3.50 Chain Reaction Cycles). It comes with little patches for little punctures and a couple of larger patches to cover more substantial damage. It also comes with some vulcanising solution (rubber glue) and a piece of sandpaper to help adhesion between the patch and the tube.

following the instructions in the package, lightly sand the tube to rough up the surface to help the patch stick. apply a blob of vulcanising solution. Then apply the patch and hold strongly for about 5 minutes while the glue sets.

Now put a little air into the tube to check for additional punctures. If there are none, seat the inner tube back into the tyre, making sure to seat the air inlet pokes through the hole in the rim. Now, using your hands, lift the rim of the tyre back over the rim of the wheel. Don't be tempted to use the tyre levers to lift the tyre back into place as this risks pinching the inner tube and ruining all your hard work as you'll need to repeat the above steps. Don't worry if it takes a while or you think you're doing it wrong. This is the most difficult part of the repair as anyone aside from a repair shop man will probably not have the grip strength needed to do it all in one go. Just take your time and make sure you don't catch the tube between the rim and the tyre as
more damage will ensue.

After all that, good luck. Let me know if there's anything I missed :)

University Open Days

So you want to go to university. You know what you want to study and you know where. But how do you get more information aboutstudying what you want where you want. Well, the best and most simple option is to go to an open day.

Weather
Not the most obvious point to consider when thinking about univerity is the weather. Open days are really exciting opportunities for you to find out as much as you can about higher education at a specific institution. It is important that you enjoy your time there so it's important to dress sensibly for the weather. Make sure you pack an umbrella for the journey if it looks to be drizzly and wear something more breathable if it's going to be really hot. A hat an suncream would be a welcome addition to the latter scenario too.

Location
Before you got to an Open day, you need to know where you're going. Make sure that you have a chat with the admissions office of the unviersity that you want to go to. They will tell you times dates and locations of the sites that are open for open days. It's also a good idea to scan the prospectus to see what you're most interested in seeing when you go. From here, you can book train tickets, bum a lift, check bus timetables and plan a whole day around your university / university town, scoping out the place to see what's what.

Information
It is important that you make the most of your open day experience. Ensure that you have a general idea of the kind of information that you want to get out of your open day and ask lots of questions to satisfy your curiosity. Don't just ask about the obvious things like the course and the general student life. It may pay to ask about:

part time jobs at university,
societies that students can get involved in
charitable involvement opportunities
The experience of the students who may be presenting to you
The proximity of shops to the university
Course composition and assesment methods

After going for a University Open day it may be a good idea to email the university to get any more information or follow up any questions that weren't satisfied on the day.

Remember, you're going to university for three years at the very least. As a result, it is important that you enjoy the town / city you're going to be living in and are comfortable with the course that you sign up to. With that said, think hard about your options and carefully choose where to study, weighing up all the options. Good luck!

college

Aimhigher but how?

Efficiency savings
The new government has, in the spirit of cost-cutting, removed the funding for the Aimhigher institute. An organisation which presents the idea of higher education to school pupils of from disadvantaged areas. The aim is to raise and stir the ambitions of students in the interest of widening participation for all and increasing the number of low-income background students going to university. An admirable and important programme.

Enthusiasm for learning
Having worked closely with some of the Aimhigher team recently, I heard about their loss of funding and imminent winding-up of the business. It was heartening to see the enthusiasm of the team and the interest of the young people in higher education. The students seemed interested in using university as a pathway to independance and learning at a higher level. The staff involved said they really enjoyed reaching out to young people and opening their minds to show them a part of the world outside their area.

Question of Support
Conversations with teachers associated with the school parties unveiled that there was a lack of support of the school system at home for many of the young people on the programme. The teachers continued, highlighting that a lack of support from home (in some cases negative reinforcement) severely hampers the positive ideas that are gained out of the Aimhigher project. They roundly supported Aimhigher and weren't happy about the removal of the funding. They ventured that planting the seeds of ideas about higher education was an important keystone to widening the participation of young people in further education. There is talk of shifting the responsibility of the funding of exercises such as these over to the universities (considering the amount to be taken in fees by the majority of HE providers in Britain, it is right that they help at least in this capacity).

New hope
The Aimhigher program is certainly dead in the water as far as its current manifestation is concerned. However, there is hope for future cohorts of students as the balance of responsibility in HE recruitment and inspiration shifts from government to universities. This shift is still a way off yet as the universities take a few years to adjust to the new fees system and balance their books before they continue bringing school pupils into the university environment to immerse them in the HE way of thinking to show them that there's much more beyond school than simply studying. That's the key and it's a shame that, for the immediate future at least, it has been lost.

Talk talk

For many, the word presentation means that their world has come to an end.Premonitions of yourself stuttering, crashing and burning in front of a thousand strong class suddenly whip up into your head. Your plams get clammy, your knees start knocking.

But it needn't be that way.

I'm a recent graduate and having gone through the academic machine myself, I've had to do all manner of presentations as part of my course, my part-time job even involved giving presentations to young people, the most challenging group to interest. And I'm going to pass these skills on to YOU!!

Note-Cards / Aide-memoirs.
First and foremost, many of you will want some sort of aid to hand during the presentation.
Whether it be out of an actual need or simply to bolster your confidence by having it there, that's fine. However, in either case, you must do this in the right way to help the credibility of your talk. Small flashcard-sized prompts work fine. Aim to put 3 or four concise points to a card and use as few as you can, this way, you don't alienate your audience as you squint at unwieldy A4 sheets. These also act as an inadvertant screen between you and those listening so it's important
to avoid this.

Know your oats
Perhaps not cereal grains but its important that you know your presentation intimately.
Know your material so you're confident you can speak well about it and handle questions with ease. If you're giving a powerpoint presentation be sure to only use the minimum of slides you can get away with (aim for 3/4/5 for a 5-10 minute presentation), whilst still communicating your points. Remember, YOU are giving the presentation so it's important that you only use the powerpoint as an aid, don't rely on it. Occasionally, look to the screen and your audience will follow, then look back to your audience. This is another technique to engage your audience and ensure that they're looking and listening.

Loud and Proud
A seemingly obvious point but it's often overlooked when you're in front of a group and it's showtime. Remember to stand up straight with shoulders back ( good posture is tantamount to a good presentation as it opens up the chest, allowing you to breathe easier) and speak loudly and clearly the back of the room. This way, everyone in the room will be able to hear you easily. This will aid relaxation allowing you to focus on the material you're talking about. Also, try to look the audience members in the eye and scan all around the room as you talk to ensure that 1) Your audience is paying attention and 2) To create a rapport with your audience. It helps to draw the audience in with eye contact because they are more likely to engage with your ideas if you're talking to them in a personal manner.

Summary
Rounding off, it's important that you only use the smallest of cards as a trigger
to help you kick of your thoughts on each of your important points. Know your material well
before the presentation and keep an order to your thoughts to aid the flow of your talk
from one point to the next. Speak loudly to ensure everyone can hear you and easily take in what you're saying. Good Luck!!