Survey: Food Budget for international students from LCC

On 22nd July 2009, a survey was carried out among 30 International Students from Pressessional English Course at LCC. The purpose of the survey was to discover the food budget for International Students so that information can be of help to coming classes.
The survey was directed to current International Student. There were six questions, (all of them involved multiple choices).

The first question concerned preference about eating outside in a restaurant or cooking by oneself. The next four questions were all concerned with food expenses. At length, the last one was related to the food expenditure as a percentage of the total weekly budget.

The main findings were as follow. “Cooking by yourself” was the most popular answer, selected by 67% of the students. The other 33% prefers to eat outside. There was a clear trend in spending between £20 to £50 weekly in groceries, 77% of the interviewed chose this answer. 53% of the students usually eat out one to three times a week, followed by 4 - 6 times a week option, chosen by 30%.

On average of how much they spend when eating out 53 % pointed out that they spend between £11 and £20 per meal. Followed by 30% with £10. Nobody chose the £21 or more option. Including groceries and eating out, 40% of the students used to spend between £30 and £50 weekly, followed by over £71, chosen by 23% and £51-£70 range, selected by 20%. Only 17% chose less than £30. Finally, 64% of the students spend between 31% and 50% of their weekly budget on food.

If any conclusion is given from the survey, they are perhaps, as follows.
International Students from the Pressessional English Course at LCC have been thinking in a considerable food budget before they came to London. Most of the meals are done cooking by themselves. On the other hand, the students like a couple of meals out during the week. Probably they would eat out more often but the budget would increase too much. On average one of their meals out is the third part of the money that they spend weekly on food.

hair band project

In the first week of the Pressessional English Course, we knew that we had to do a Marketing Project... after a couple of weeks the moment to start to work just arrived, and with it, the time to choose the members of each team. My team was composed by Enya, Oat, the two designers, Chico and Sally and finally me. Actually I think we were a very nice team but to be honest, I was afraid about working in a group. In Mexico group work is part of the tasks at Universities and always is interesting trying to understand the way different persons think, but here the predicament was also that everybody was from different cultures, backgrounds, etc. Anyway at the end everything was ok.

It was very easy to be participative, to explain our ideas and work. We found a good product and we just tried to develop the marketing points. At some point Oat wanted to develop another product because this is a little bit girlish but we decided to vote and do the things democratic, he lost but he accepted that.

I am proud that we managed to work well and that our product was well received. Even though we didn’t win the competition I feel our product was the one that was the easiest to actually develop. Additionally I liked the fact that all groups presented and we could learn from other presentations not only for our own but for future projects as well.

Academic Writing

One of the most important things in Academic Writing is to be precise and specific, something that normally we don’t do. We have to try focusing on one thing at the time instead of talking about everything. Academic writing involves thinking, to be reflective and critical about the topics at study.
Academic writing also is based in having an Argument, in other words, knowledgeable information. One argument needs a strong thesis statement. Academic way looks to prove something through examples and analyses. By examining the argument, and backing it up, it’s easy to see the way your mind works.
Just like we read in one of the articles, academic writing is centred on questions of interest to the academic community (from scholars to scholars). Sometimes it’s very improbable that you can get away with general and almost meaningless topics. That’s why the academic community expects that you fully analyze the texts you read.
For me, other crucial difference between Academic Writing and High School Writing is the professor expectations because the papers are judged by a much higher standard. You will not just be judged on the quality of your ideas alone, but also on your presentation of those ideas, so you will be expected to have perfect grammar, spelling, and structure. It may sound difficult, more for foreigners like us, but I think that being forced to write in an academic environment is one of the best methods to learn how to think.
I’m sure that after our own Masters and after living immersed in an Academic environment, writing and critical thinking will improve, I’m conscious it means hard work and a lot of frustration but I hope with a happy ending.

Formal and Informal English style

It's hard to say goodbye

As everything in life, all the things that start have to finish, the problem is when they were so good it’s even harder to say goodbye to them...

This Friday my husband finished his two years MBA, and although we were travelling a lot to different places, and in my case I just started to live definitely in London a few months ago, (in other words without trips or travels to Mexico) I feel that we already have a family in London. We made great friends here and now is time to say goodbye to some of them. The majority are from Latin-America but also in our group we have some people from Europe, America and Asia... you know is normal in London to have people from many places in the same group. In Mauricio’s generation there were around 315 persons with around 65 different nationalities, that was amazing!! Anyway...

A big number of them have to go back to their countries, even when they were planning to stay here. Why? The reason is this horrible crisis that is involving all the countries over the world. Obviously some countries more than others and England is one of the most affected because London is one of the biggest financial centres in the world and precisely the financial sector is one of the most distressed all over the world... Many people have been laid off from their jobs and there are some others that cannot find one. It’s difficult for everyone, but it is even more for us, the foreigners, because the companies prefer to give jobs to British people before other nationalities and to be honest, is very logic and understandable.

Back to the point we are in the middle of one of the saddest moments, we already started to say goodbye to people that we love, and we know deep in our hearts that we won’t see some of them ever again.

Writing an essay!!!

Sometimes is hard trying to get out from your parameters. All your life you have been receiving an education from your own country with their paradigms, methods, ideologies , etcetera. From one day to the other, you have to try to change your mind and adapt to your new English reality with all the implications

Today we talked about the process of writing an essay, obviously in the British system. Some things are similar to what they are in Mexico, but other things are totally different. One of the best examples is that during my university courses, it was obligatory to write an essay covering the number of pages that the professors wanted... It seemed that the important thing was how many words you were able to write making sense, and not what was the main topic or your critical opinion... I remember once one of my professors told me “I don’t care about what you think, I just care about the author’s opinion”

In Mexico when you write an essay the introduction is the most general part, actually you don’t talk about anything in specific, you don’t provide details to the reader, is so general... Here, If I understood well, when somebody is reading the introduction, he/she can know what is the most important point about the text even though it is still the general part

On the other hand, in Mexico also we use to divide the essay in Introduction, Hypothesis, Method (Who, where, what), results and conclusions. Normally this is the order that every homework has to be written, but in the University they teach you that the important thing is to cover up all the points of this method without any importance of the order. Sometimes you can start the text with the results or with your conclusions and during the body work you can write the method and the hypothesis that you had

Anyway, is good to know and process the differences, with this information is going to be easy start my MA... I’m glad to be in this course! Fiuff!!