Reflections on my Leicester Award Journey

As the Leicester award for online networking that I am currently undertaking draws to a close, here is a video presentation of my reflections on my progress. 

Please have a listen, and excuse the poor audio!

Studying Abroad

As any linguist will tell you, studying in the country of the language that you're learning, makes the world of difference. So as part of my degree I am doing just that.
From September 2013 I will be studying at the Université d'Avignon, in the south of France and then in February I will move to Barcelona, to study at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: UAB.
These are adventures that I am extremely excited about and I know that they will be a brilliant opportunity to not only improve my French and Spanish Language respectively, but also my independent organisational skills and my ability to adapt to new situations as they rise.

So feel free to take a look at my travel blog!

lucytraveldiary.blogspot.co.uk

Leicester Award for Employability: Online Networking

By undertaking the Leicester Award for Employability: Online Networking -my second Leicester award- I was hoping to understand more about how to best utilise social media and what should be posted online. I chose it mainly because I already used many social media sites and with my study abroad period coming up, I knew I'd be using them a lot more and I wanted to be able to best use them to my advantage.

The first step on the award, researching myself on the internet, instantly highlighted the importance of security to me. Although on the whole I did not appear many times in the search result, it made me aware of how public my profiles are. Therefore I changed privacy details and edited what I wanted to be made readily available. I have now developed my awareness of internet privacy and how profiles can also be found via images and videos, not just search results. Other peoples' experiences of this, as detailed in our online discussion groups, have only made me more conscious of the issue and how anything that you post on the internet could be made accessible. 

However, on the flip side, I have learnt about how it is still necessary to have profiles on social networking sites in order to create an Online Digital Footprint for oneself. For example, I did not realise that employers can be wary of people that are not part of any social media website or have incomplete profiles. This pushed me to update my LinkedIn and Google+ accounts so that potential employers have all of my current information and the sites portray an up to date reflection of who I am. Furthermore I have linked them up, via this blog so that my online 'brand' is accessible all in one place.

Another lesson that I have learnt is how to connect with employers and the ease of connecting with them through social media. Each platform is used for different reasons, be it to connect with others or to promote their product. Therefore I understand that each site has different etiquette that should to be adhered to and shouldn't be forgotten. For example if I wanted to contact an employer I would use a platform such as LinkedIn or Facebook, rather than twitter where I may not be able to express everything I want to say, with the correct grammar in 140 characters. 

Finally, I believe that I have been able to better my reflective writing style and blogging skills through taking part. As the content should reflect me I have worked hard on my writing style and in order to work on it more I will continue to blog any transferrable skills that I gain and soon I will start a blog to document my study abroad period as previously mentioned.

I think that I have learnt about what I originally thought I would, and now I am learning more. These are commercial awareness skills and networking knowledge that I will continue to employ in the future, to make sure that the content that I put online is both well thought out and accurately reflects me.

University of Leicester Student Awards

Recently I attended the university's annual student award event, that gives recognition to both individual students and student led societies that have been successful or had achievements over the course of the academic year. I attended due to the fact that the Modern Languages society had been nominated for Academic society of the year.
Being part of the committee as a social secretary has been both rewarding and good fun, which is in part, the reason for the success that we have had this year. I primarily chose to become part of this committee in order to try my hand at organising events in a society of which I already enjoyed being a part of. Furthermore I knew that it would be an ideal chance to enhance my team working skills.  I have worked alongside like-minded hard-working committee members and under the leadership of a dedicated president. Our common goal was to create enjoyable academic and social events for our members, in particular a formal Summer Ball, so that we could be nominated for a Society award.

In order to achieve this goal we each worked on projects or certain aspects of an event independently to utilise our time well. However we also came together to work as a team, offering a wide variety of knowledge and mutual support to each other. For example when we planned the Summer Ball together, we each had certain tasks to organise and then we would report back to the committee to make a final decision. I researched venues, pricing and menus, collecting together a selection of possibilities to put to the committee vote. This meant that everyone was involved and it was voted on fairly. We also worked together on table decorations, selling tickets and preparing the venue on the day. Working in a team did not mean that there was always somebody to rely upon should somebody not be pulling their weight, but rather that everything ran more efficiently because everybody was ready to work together.

As well as being able to balance independent and team work, this developed my awareness of  balancing planning and organisation with flexibility; often certain things could not be planned for (such as numbers of people attending events or in the case of the Ball, last minute drop outs) and therefore I would have to be ready to adapt to the situation to ensure it still ran smoothly.

I believe I have since been able to call upon these honed team work sills in my part time job, as I now have a better knowledge of when independent work or supporting a colleague may be necessary. Being part of the UoL Modern Languages committee has been an experience that I have gained an awful lot from and I learnt that by enjoying what I was doing meant that I got a lot more out of it that if I didn't.

All of our work paid off as we won the award, the second time in the society's short 4 year history. I am proud to say that I was part of such a wonderful society.

(From left to right) Me, a publicity secretary, the president and the vice president with the award.