Hi Friends, Scottish Institute for Enterprise have a number of in-house events and competitions that we run each year, such as The Student Enterprise Summit and the New Ventures competition. These are always really popular and well attended, and will always get their own updates!
However, in addition to these we’re also very lucky to have a terrific number of regional events this year. Enterprise interns at institutions all over Scotland have been hard at work creating events for their own areas. Events such as the upcoming Meet The Entrepreneur event in Edinburgh, with a visit to a local successful business, or the Pub Quiz organized in Glasgow last week! As Open University students can be found in every town and community in Scotland, having events that may be a bit nearer to home is a real boost, and there is no event that OU students should feel they are not included in. So this has been a fine start to the year, too much to do and too little time.
Keeping track of all these events will be a challenge, so thankfully the Regional Events page on SIE is listing as many of them as possible. We currently have listings for events in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Some of these are Non-SIE events that have been organized by University or entrepreneurship groups, and with Global Entrepreneurship Week coming this list will be pretty full indeed.
I’ve added these Regional Events to the links in this blog, keep checking back, and if something catches your eye then check it out!
Hi Friends, here at Scottish Institute for Enterprise our popular New Ideas competition has returned for 2013-2014 as Fresh Ideas and is GO for launch!
Fresh Ideas is perfect for you IF:
If you don’t know know a lot about business (Newbies welcome!)
If your idea is early–stage
If you are studying in Scotland or recently graduated
If you want to increase your business know-how and gain useful skills
If you want to win £100 (regional) or £500 (national) or both!
Aye that’s right, you know I’m talking about you 😉
Fresh ideas is run first by each Scottish Institution with local prizes, with finalists proceeding to the national competition. Finalists will have the opportunity to attend our Start-Up Day in February, a day dedicated to helping you develop your idea, enhancing your skills and build new relationships.
Our new online application system will allow you to save your progress as you go. That means you can: Get an idea jolt (The good kind). Take some time to ponder (possibly in a chair while stroking your chin?). Come back to your application. Progress! Repeat until complete. Deadline for Entry: November 29th 2013.
Have Questions? Get in Touch!
You can always find me on twitter at @SIE_OU and on Facebook at our SIE Open University Scotland Group where you’ll find info on regional and social events, competitions and whatever fun things the internet brings me.
Hi Friends, The Scottish Institute for Enterprise is back for the new academic year! This is what has been going on…
The Young Innovators Challenge (YIC 2013) wrapped up
Winners of The YIC 2013: David Townsend, Victoria Hamilton, Michael Yiin Shih Jie, and Blair Bowman. Winner Laura Jayne Nevin was unable to attend.
Five young entrepreneurs were awarded £50,000 each, plus one year of business support for their ideas. From the press release: “Blair Bowman (Aberdeen University), David Townsend (St Andrews University), Laura Jayne Nevin (Edinburgh College of Art), Michael Yiin Shih Jie (Edinburgh University) and Victoria Hamilton (Strathclyde University) impressed the judges with their business plans during a tense process to claim the £50,000 and one year of dedicated business support to turn their ideas into reality.”
Here are some of the highlights from the competition!
And the winners made the papers
So then all of us at Scottish Institute for Enterprise got together… And said hello to some new faces!
I’m on the left, easily identifiable by my jumping at the wrong time!
These are my fellow interns, they are students at different Colleges and Universities across Scotland. There they will be communicating and interacting with their fellow students to promote enterprise and entrepreneurship!
New Ventures has a top prize of £10,000 and is for students with an existing business idea that is ready to go!
Fresh Ideas will award five winners £500 each and is designed to help you learn how to develop an idea!
Regional events and competitions just for you
Well, as an Open University student study is decentralised, a fancy way to say we work remotely and aren’t campus based. We have classes that begin in both October and February, so some students (like me) have had classes throughout the summer and are just about to sit an exam ( …yay). This has the benefit of making education accessible regardless of where you are in Scotland, but it also means we don’t get to say hello face to face so often. With students all over Scotland it would be nice to have some fun activities near home, right?
So with that in mind, this year we’ll have much more regional activities and events that Open University students can take part in!
Hi Friends, this is part II of the Study Smart post!
Last post I mentioned a Time Ideas article about exam preparation that identified Spaced-repetition and Practice testing as the two best tactics around. Why? They are both active strategies. Not simply reviewing material, but actually practicing recall. Research has found that actively recalling information is one critical component in memorization.
The problem is it can be difficult to know how to implement a new method. Open University students tend to have jobs, families and commitments alongside their studies and so time is usually already stretched as it is. “Spaced repetition and practice testing” sound good, but how to quickly put it into practice? Not immediately obvious.
Highlighting and scribbling in margins isn’t effective, but it is quick and easy and that is one reason they are such common habits (Admittedly this technique will work for some people, but many people use it whether it works or not).
One thing I wanted for years was to be able to communicate in another language. I never got on well with languages at school (Memorizing tables of grammar rules, woohoo). Then I saw an article on Lifehacker about language learning, written by a person who had used spaced repetition and practice testing to learn 4 languages in just a few years. You can read that post here. The author used a free flashcard program called Anki to do it. Sure enough, Anki is perfect for any subject of study.
So The Anki flashcard program is free to download and use, and is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and anything with a web browser. Anki also has excellent documents on its site about how to get started, and there are dozens of how-to videos like this one.
You build decks of cards, and each card has a front and back. Question on one side and answer in the other. Each card can go forward, reverse or both directions. Just add your notes and Anki will generate your cards to form the deck, and each deck can be as few or many cards as you need.
The beauty of it lies in the algorithm it uses for spaced-repetition. Each day it provides cards to revise, spacing out the introduction of new information bit by bit (Example: 20 new cards per day). When practicing with your deck, each card you practice will repeat based on how difficult you found it (Again, Good or Easy). Cards you want to see again will reappear sooner and more frequently, with cards you find easy coming up less often.
If you find just text dull, you can attach both images AND audio, you can engage multiple methods simultaneously (For example: Hearing the answer while you read it). By creating decks for each module or course you can practice-test your facts, definitions, figures, graphs and diagrams a few minutes a day. By adding this habit to your study strategy you will likely see excellent progress.
Make it a habit by setting yourself a 10 minute goal! 10 minutes per day, consistently. 10 minutes might not sound like much, but that adds up to over an hour of *testing* your memory in an active and engaged way every single week. Build that into a habit during a course and it adds up to less stress, less cramming and very likely better results with less time.
For more incentive, look at the Wikipedia page for Roger Craig, the highest earning winner of all-time on Jeopardy! Roger used Anki to prepare for the show, and later went on to win the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions. So give it a try! There is nothing to lose (And it could even make you a pub quiz guru!).
Hi Friends, For those of us studying at The Open University, exam season can be a particularly hard knock. The OU allows people who might not have studied for a long time to learn new subjects and develop new skills from wherever you are, and regardless of your background. A few students I’ve chatted to hadn’t studied since GCSE’s or A-levels, and for some it had been years or decades since their last day of doom exams.
Thankfully, most courses early-on are exam free, but if you stick with it long enough eventually you reach a day of reckoning. When you then find an exam on your calendar, hurtling ever closer, it is nerve-wracking. I don’t need to go into the stress exams can cause. I have recent previous study and have done exams within the last few years, but even with that to back me up I still found taking my first exam in a new subject difficult. It is OK to be nervous!
There’s obviously lots to help with the nerves, but one thing that is almost certain to help is:
Feeling confident in your knowledge of the material
If I know a topic backwards forwards and inside out and upside down, then I go in knowing that at least the ground beneath me is solid, even if my stomach is not. And if it doesn’t help? Well it certainly won’t hurt!
How do you get this mythical “confidence in your knowledge”? Well I came across an article from ideas.time.com awhile ago about techniques “Highlighting is a waste of time” and it got me thinking about that. Do we do things because they work or because they are just habitual?
What I found: All my usual tactics (Highlighting and underlining until the pages are illegible) were counted in the WORST column. No gold star there.
However: The two techniques listed as proven BEST were two I have been using to learn another language, and I just hadn’t considered that the same could be applied to exams.
Spaced Repetition and Practice Testing
So what does spaced repetition and practice testing mean? The author of the Time article suggests the use of a flashcard app, and that is absolutely correct. I’ve been using a great free tool for almost a year now which works wonders, and it’s called:
Anki is a free, easy to use flashcard program that is available for *every* platform. Anki allows you to create your own memory cards, share decks you create, and search for shared decks. It uses an algorithm to space repetition of your cards, meaning you learn each piece of information at intervals to ensure you actually LEARN it.
There will be a Part II to this post coming very soon! It will cover how you can start using an efficient and effective way to revise for your exams. We’ll talk about how you can start using spaced repetition and practice testing quickly and simply, and how to incorporate it when you plan your exam-attack. No study skill that is too complicated or involved is going to help, so we’ll keep it simple! See you then 🙂
Hi Friends, I was thinking recently about something I’ve noticed as a student.
One of my favorite TED talks is by a Neuroscientist named Michael Merzenich, and within his video he introduces the brain as machine and says “It is constructed for change”. Change is the nature of existence, yet when it comes to energy or emotions students sometimes seem like they are totally caught out.
Everything moves in cycles, stocks have booms and busts, industries have business cycles and there are roughly four seasons in a year. Summer lasts for one season. Or less. (But certainly not more, this is not Westeros.)
AND YET somehow as students we have the idea that these change-machines inside our heads should NOT have cycles, that as long as we feed it a balanced diet and rest it once a day it can continue to operate at a steady consistent humming speed. We act like we are always at peak performance. We wonder why we wake up one day and are utterly sick of the whole thing and can’t recall why we started.
So why does it seem we all forget that this even exists until it is right on top of us? How do we convince ourselves that cycles and of change and response don’t apply to us? Runners experience the runners high, a huge endorphin boost that can eliminate feelings of stress and fatigue (It is super awesome). However: runners ALSO know that it comes to a very definite end, and when it does it is called HITTING THE WALL.
SO what to do? As a starting point, here are a few treatment and prevention points that might be of assistance.
On Burnout:
Accept that at some point you are probably going to develop burnout. You might even be on your way right now. You might want to never open your books again, you might consider quitting. This is OK, even though it is not an easy thing to admit. It does not mean you are a bad student. To a large degree, our success as students depends on our ability to be interested in what we study, so admitting when we are not firing on all cylinders is a huge step.
If you are not already doing so, take care of yourself. Commit to eating healthy food that you enjoy the taste of, commit to fresh air and physical activity that you enjoy. Two things that help me are running and rock climbing. Commit to spending your time with good company. Commit to your sleep. There are limitless places to find information on each of these, I recommend Zen Habits, Lifehacker and Fitocracy.
If you have sources of stress in your life that you can eliminate somehow then do it. Have a strategy for managing your stress before it manages you. And if some things need to not get done well then don’t sweat it. Burnout can go hand in hand with perfectionism and trying to be everything to everyone all the time. Expecting yourself to be perfect is a burden, losing sleep, eating poorly and becoming stressed and anxious to be perfect is not worth it.
On that note, with each leap and bound in performance we soon start experiencing diminishing returns in our results. Know when to quit. “After x hours I could get 90%, but if I just do double the hours I’ll get an extra 3%!” Not sustainable. Also not good business. Being good is not the same thing as being perfect. Yes this might mean you get a lower mark. If you had unlimited hours then every task on earth would be done flawlessly. But you don’t.
If you feel like you need to take a break, take one. Let yourself have some fun. There is nothing Stoic about struggling onward when it is the wrong time. Don’t think about should. I should be this I should be that, I should should should. The world is full of shoulds, and sometimes ignoring them all is the best option. Have some time off, take a study-holiday for a night or a day or a weekend. This is OK. And if you can, try to take actual holidays too.
Share your thoughts with others. A lot of the time you’ll find the feeling is mutual. Recently I mentioned in a group that I felt drained by one of my courses. Reading the words but they weren’t going in. Quite a few people responded in complete agreement. There is tremendous value in this. Everyone gets sick and tired of work, even work they enjoy. Don’t be isolated.
Treat yourself. So this goes along with “take a break” but sometimes they are distinct. Example: I bought an aeropress coffee maker, and have been experimenting with it since then. This was a nice treat as I get the satisfaction of fresh delicious coffee in the morning instead of instant crystals (Seriously what are those things?) and it is a good start to the day. Sometimes it is the small things.
Take pride in your achievements. What you are doing is hard. You are bettering yourself. You are putting yourself through the paces on a course that challenges you. You are stepping out of your comfort zone. If you are studying with The Open Unibersity this also means you are doing it entirely upon your own initiative. YOU made this decision. You said “This I am going to do”. Friend, you are a badass.
Note: I am not an expert or a doctor. Neither is Bill Murray. This post might not be what you need if you feel you need assistance with emotional or mental health issues. In that case your best bet is a qualified practitioner:)
Now that the Spring weather is on the way (It is I tell you!) it is time to shake out the cobwebs and breathe in some fresh air. I can think of no better way to do that then by getting your brains pumping with imagination and winning a prize at the same time!
Send me your answer to the following question and you could win £20 of book tokens to spend at a UK bookstore of your choice!
If I could start ANY type of business, what type of business would that be?
Email your answer to OU.Intern@sie.ac.uk
Sky is the limit here friends, if you could just go for it without fear, what would you go for? A second little prize will also be given for silliest response!
You’ve got until March 6th to enter, so get your thinking cap on!
Please follow me on twitter at @SIE_OU and check out our Facebook group SIE Open University Scotland for more information, news and competitions.
Enterprise goes Everywhere 