Volunteering and my experience volunteering abroad

Volunteering is a great thing to do and always looks especially impressive on your  CV! 

If you just want a weekend volunteering scheme, every charity shop will give the opportunity for ANYONE to volunteer their time.

This is fab because it not only shows you're a nice person but because you'll be working with intake, outtake, customers and money at the cashier you'll be checking off a lot of boxes when applying for a job so when you go for that interview you can come out doing this:

I volunteered in an Oxfam and at the start it's not great because you're usually working at the back and sorting through everything that gets sent in (trust me some people give away some weird stuff - this one time I found a used toothbrush!-) but once they realise you're capable of more you get to move to the front of the shop and work behind the till. One of the greatest things about working in a charity shop is the conversation you get from the older ladies, especially the ones who like to gossip. If this is something that interests you, head down to your local charity shop (for us ROHO people there is PLENTY to choose from) and volunteer yourself.

Another way to volunteer is rubbish picking in your community and a lot of universities offer this as a volunteer scheme.

this photo is of a group of Northern Londoners joining together for the Interfaith Litter-Picking Social Action Project. If you want to find out anymore about it, here's the link: http://communities.um-uk.org/2009/12/03/1912/

It's not the most elegant of jobs and probably won't get you much experience for your future job but if you do it with friends it can be a lot of fun. If you pick up the rubbish in your local town it also allows you to become more well known among everyone and this will help if you want connections into a local business (believe me ANY kind of connection is better than no connection)

Many schools also offer volunteer placements allowing students to volunteer themselves in working situations, such as nursery teaching, nursing, coaching and if your school or university or local centre offers this GET INVOLVED. I can not emphasise how good it is and how worthwhile it is.

I'm someone who is always busy so for me it's hard to volunteer myself during the week so I decided to volunteer abroad during the summer. It was by far the best experience of my entire life so far and would recommend anyone thinking about it or considering it to stop thinking and book it! I knew I wanted to volunteer as an English teacher. It took me a very long time to scroll through all the different links that came up but by doing this I knew that the company I went with I was completely satisfied with.

I volunteered with a company called SL Volunteers

They are a British based company that allows students and graduates to volunteer in Sri Lanka for five weeks at the minimum in the summer. There are two programmes: the psychology programme and the teaching programme. I signed up for the teaching programme and once I had paid, applied for my visa, had my injections and made sure I had all the correct clothing I was ready to go. I was there for 5 weeks and it was incredible. I can't tell you what a typical day was because each day was different but I varied in teaching English to adults that were very advanced and simply helping them with their pronunciation for interviews and teaching complete beginners that were new to phrases like "my name is". The amount of students in each class also varied but you were never alone in a classroom so if there were too many students which sometimes happened we would split the class into two groups. We stayed with a local Sri Lankan family and there was about 5-7 people staying with each family. It sounds quite intimidating but the family soon become your family and you begin to love them and their cooking. Here's a photo of my Sri Lankan family and I:

I am someone who used to hate spicy food and so was scared of eating the local curries made by the family but they were awesome and now I'm a proper spice lover! Another great thing about the trip was that the company gave you the weekend off which meant that you were allowed to travel round the different areas of Sri Lanka each weekend and many people took an extra week after completing the volunteering because there is so much to see in the country. I got to see and do so much over the summer and have made some life-long friends so like I said before if you're even considering it, DO IT!  Here's a link to the SL Volunteers Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/slvolunteersorganisation?fref=ts
and their website:  http://www.slvolunteers.com/

Here are some photos from my trip:

On top of elephant rock

Sigiriya rock

Galle, Sri Lanka

Last meal in the house

Dressed in traditional saree for a Sri Lankan party

Jet-skiing in Una Watuna, Sri Lanka

THE GANG!

If people are interested I'll post a separate blog with all the essential information a person needs when volunteering abroad and staying with a foreign family :) let me know if you'd like one :)

That's all for now,
Emma
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Money at Uni!

It's that beautiful time of the term when you look at your online bank account and all of a sudden you've got an extra £1000/$800 (depending on where you live) or more in your account and you feel a little bit like this:

But trust me...this feeling will soon turn into:

when you begin to realise that nearly all of that loan will end up covering either your rent, bills or books for your course if your like me and do a degree that revolves around books.

The little bit of your money that you have left over is supposed to be for the rest of the term but for most students out there it goes a little like this:

1. loan comes 
2. freshers week hits
3. alcohol happens
4. loan is gone in less than two weeks. 

I'm writing this blog entry as a helpful guide to save your money as much as possible because believe me I know what it's like to be at the point where you're running so low on money that you have to remove the blue bits of the bread because you're refusing to go to the shops...I'm now refusing myself to get to that situation again so here are some tips that I'm going to leave you with:

• If you have an online bank account, check it weekly! I have an online account and never checked it as a sort of fear as to what I was going to witness but trust me it helps, I've prevented myself from going into my overdraft on many occasions because of this easy little tip

• If you have to go out then PRE-DRINK! It's so much cheaper and sometimes ends up being more fun than the actual night because you're with your closest friends and not sweaty

• When you're out don't take your card with you!!! Taking your debit card with you to a club or to your student's union is the worst mistake and nothing's worse than that feeling of waking up the next day realising you bought at least 10 drinks for yourself plus loads for your friends and have no money left for actual food and necessities...your expression will usually be something like this every time "mum" or "dad" appears on your phone:

• Give yourself a weekly budget. If you're someone who likes to spend more money on going out than food consider that and also consider WHERE you live and where you do your weekly shop, a person's weekly budget who lives in Norwich is going to be very different to the weekly shop of a person living in London. 

• Look for the sales! I just bought the most amazing boots in a 50% off sale and know I will wear them all the time.

• Make sure you buy your books before freshers week! This is important and something I stupidly didn't do last year. Trust me, you don't want to be the only person on your first ever seminar without your book! I've definitely learnt from that mistake. 

I hope that my little useful tips help. I will regularly remind you of another useful guide to saving money but for now, I think that's enough. I hope those of you that have returned to work, school or uni are having a great time and if not it's midway through the week so you don't have long till the weekend.

You know where to find me,

Cheerio,

Emma

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P.S An extra little note: for all those twitter lovers out there, I've set myself up on the social site so follow me @ezmaar :)

Nearly back to university

The Christmas holidays are nearly done and that means work is due very very soon. Today was a day for referencing and editing all of my essays...definitely not much fun at all!

This was what I thought I looked like for most of the day:

This is what I actually looked like:

 But it has to be done and as I absolutely hate referencing, I thought I'd share with you some useful tips and websites that helped me out loads:

Useful Tips:

1. If you use a book, website or literally anything (that includes an image off google) make sure you note it down somewhere, this doesn't have to be the full editor, author but literally just scribble down a little memo to remind yourself that you used it to help you.

2. Don't panic! I do this all the time. I always leave referencing to the last minute and end up panicking when really I don't need to, it's just something that needs to get done and so there's not much use in worrying

3. Make sure you know exactly what referencing style your course needs (I use MLA but that might be different to a lot of you out there)

When you're ready to make your footnotes and bibliography here's an excellent site that my friend Emma Peagam shared with me:

http://www.easybib.com/

It's amazing and you can easily choose what type of source it is (website, journal, book, video etc)and  what referencing style you want. I seriously recommend this! 

For those of you with no work load like those of us at university and school, you're very lucky! Well it's a very short one today because I got to get back to my bibliography...such fun!

Stay warm, it's starting to get colder

Emma

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New passport, new places

It's always so exciting when you get something in the post, even if it's just your monthly bill from the bank, when you see that letter or parcel with your name on the front you can't help jump up and down a little well I know I certainly do. I ordered a new passport weeks ago and it only just recently arrived, it's not very interesting and very possibly the least blogged about thing ever but I was genuinely so excited to receive something I did a little celebration dance :)

Now I feel that I've got this I need to jet off to loads of exotic places so I've created a list of places I want to visit by my 21st so that's in a year and a month. Here it is:

Paris

California

Figi

Germany

New Zealand

Hawaii

Morocco

Mexico

Kenya
New York (I've already been but it's my favourite place ever so it was a definite for the list)

If I get to any of these places I'll let you know but that's just been added to my resolutions :) speaking of resolutions as I mentioned in one of my other blogs a main one of mine is to teach myself the piano and it's going really well! Can't do left hand yet but I'm getting the hang of the melodies so I'll keep you updated with that, how is everyone keeping up with their resolutions? 

I've also been applying for loads of journalism internships so fingers crossed I get something so I can pursue my dream as a broadcast journalist :) I would literally love to get an internship in London so I'll let you lot know how I get on with it!

That's all for today,

Cheerio,

Emma

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my new satchel

I got a beautiful satchel from my sister for Christmas. It is navy, white and brown and suits me so much!

What do you think? 

It's fake leather but feels real and fits everything I need in. If you ever see me, I will be donning this beauty

Much love,

Emma

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One resolution down...

So one of my resolutions was to learn the piano and I have officially taught myself 'Honey, Honey' from the Mamma Mia soundtrack, that and the Rent music are the only piano books I have so I'm teaching myself through musical theatre :) I'm taking a keyboard back to uni with me so by next year hopefully I'll be able to sing and play at the same time!! I'll upload my progress on here but considering it was my first day today I didn't want to harm your ears :) my other resolutions include: go to the gym more, lose weight, finish my story, write a play, get a job and spend less money on nights out...so far so good!

How is everyone? It's been a while since I've been online but I've had a bunch of tedious essays to write and you all know the drill. 

Anyway I've also started reading thr new Bridget Jones book

I'm a huge Bridget Jones fan and know every line to the first and second film (let's just take a second to appreciate Collin Firth and Hugh Grant fighting in a fountain) but this book seems very different. I'm about a quarter of the way through and I've discovered she's no longer with Mr Darcy and has kids (sorry to spoil but you find both of these out within the first three pages) which I'm shocked by! What happened to Darcy? Part of the reason it makes me sad is simply due to the fact that if they make a film out of this one as they have with the others, Collin Firth won't be in it! But it's easy to read and makes me actually laugh out loud which is hard to do with books- I can cry easily at books but find it hard to actually laugh, not entirely sure why but life goes on. If anyone is considering reading this I would definitely say go ahead, it's an easy read and is perfect for relaxing, Bridget is now older so although the context may not directly relate to the younger audience, the writing remains as funny and unique as the other two books.

Much love,

Emma

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My tops of 2013

Every tv channel or magazine or newspaper seems to be doing the top 10 books, songs, films, shows etc of 2013 so I thought what the hell why not join the phase but instead of doing top 10 I'm just gonna do my top 5...

Top 5 books I read:

1. The Great Gatsby
2. 1984
3. Sense and Sensibility
4. 'Our Class' (it's a play but I'm sure I can still count it in)
5. Before I Die

Top 5 films:

1. Silver Linings Playbook
2. Les Miserables
3. The Great Gatsby
4. Frozen
5. Side Effects

Top 5 songs:

1. Roar
2. 22
3. Pompeii
4. Chocolate
5. Let It Go

Top 5 tv series:

1. New Girl (with nick and Jess together I'm able to look past the bad writing in this season)
2. Girls
3. Glee (the quarterback episode was so sad and emotionally brilliant that it brought the show into the list)
4. The Originals (with the ridiculous storylines in the vampire diaries I much prefer watching klaus)
5. Orange Is the new Black

That's all for now

Cheerio,
Emma
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