Sunday 24 January 2016

Dogs Trust

I have a bit of a different theme for today's post, so bear with me if this doesn't interest you (although I hope it does, because it's a good cause). Anyway, I recently started volunteering at a Dogs Trust shop, and I just wanted to talk a bit about volunteering in general.

My school has been pretty insistent in the past year or so that we dedicate some time to volunteering. This could be in school or outside of it, and to be honest it was just easier for me to give up my time to mentor a year seven in English. I was doing this before my head of sixth form started to remind us about it, so it was natural just to use this as my volunteering. I didn't really look about volunteering elsewhere until recently, and even then it was more to gain experience as I'd had a few unsuccessful job applications.

It was actually a bit of luck that I landed the role. I had gone into town to get some bits and bobs for my EPQ and for Christmas, and decided to pop into the Dogs Trust shop to see if they had some cards. As I was paying I asked if they had any places available, and the woman at the till (who is now a colleague haha) got me to meet the manager. She gave me a form to fill in and organised a time for an interview for the following weekend. I had a work experience placement but that was all I had to go on, so my retail training was limited. The manager was lovely, however, and assured me that they would show me how to use the till and things like that.

Since then, every Wednesday I give up some of my time to help them out. Sometimes it is quiet, and it does get a little boring but I realise that it is completely worth it, and not just in terms of having something to put on my CV. It's worth it because in some small way I'm making a difference. My being there enables to manager/assistant manager to get on with other jobs that need doing, and although I'm not selling the products like a street vendor mights, I still get to serve the customers that are contributing monetarily to Dogs Trust.

Dogs Trust is a brilliant charity. The 'a dog is for life, not just for Christmas' campaign is probably one of the better known charity slogans. They do an incredibly jobs of rehoming and rescuing dogs but it can't be done without the help of people like you and me. If you would like to find out more about Dogs Trust, click here and you'll be able to find out more about what they do, how to get involved yourself and of course see if there are any dogs at your nearest centre that need a good home.

We all give up our time, whether its for reading a book or to watch a TV programme, so why not use that spare time to help a good cause?

Until next time.


Sunday 10 January 2016

EPQs, mocks and coursework

Greetings, readers!

I trust you are doing well? For me, January is proving to be a very busy month and this is primarily down to school so I sincerely hope you aren't all sharing in my feelings of stress.

The workload of my Extended Project Qualification is continuing as strongly as ever. I do find it really interesting. I guess that's why they let us pick the topic - if I was just given a title to work with I would have dropped the qualification months ago. As it is, my EPQ is all about Natural Horsemanship. I'm so bad (or good, depending on your point of view) at procrastinating that the months where I should have been completing all my research went to waste and the actual essay writing part was delayed. I'm getting back on track now thanks to an extension, but it is still a lot to deal with given other school work that demands attention. For more organised people, I'm fairly sure the EPQ is a breeze.

On top of that I have mock exams and more coursework to complete. It feels like Christmas was several months ago as it really wasn't much of a break. As soon as Christmas and Boxing Day were out of the way I began revising for the mocks in earnest because I really hadn't been too productive. This mostly involved preparing for my History mock as it is probably the subject I struggle with the most. My teacher had thankfully taken pity on us and provided us with the questions that we would be able to answer in the mock examination, so at least I could properly revise with the question in mind. On the plus side, I was off timetable for mock week so at least I get a bit of an extra holiday in that sense.

Now that the mocks are out of the way, however, it means that I now have two pieces of coursework to complete. Whilst these are shorter than the EPQ (these are 2,000 and 3,000 words) it is so much harder because you actually have to stick to the word limit. This is quite difficult given the amount you have to include to get a decent mark, so here's to a month of writing, editing, rewriting and more editing on really depressing topics!

In all honesty though, I knew this month was going to be busy. Now that school is about to start again all the teachers will be very aware that we pretty much only have four months before we go on study leave so there isn't much time left to complete the courses and do practice papers and the likes. Even so, knowing is different to experiencing. Is it foolish to be optimistic that it won't be too bad? I hope not, because optimism is definitely one of the few things keeping the anxiety at bay!

I hope you all had a lovely holiday and are able to have a relaxing start to the new year.

Until next time!