Higher Education 12:12

In my group we were tasked with promoting taking a gap year after Sixth Form. This year is more important than other years because if students want to go to University then they will have to pay the higher fees.

The class are researching Universities, apprenticeships, jobs and gap years. All of this will be made in to a display board at the back of the classroom to promote what opportunities BTEC National Media Students can do after completing the course. The board should be ready before Sixth Form open evening.

In my group, my role was to find actual gap years which are relevant to the course and can help make you stand out from the average media student when applying to universities or jobs. I found Gap Year 365 to be a very interesting website with lots of great gap years open which people could sign up to from them.

I studied three different gap year placements which I felt were relevant to the creative media national course. These were:

1. TV Internship - Perth, Australia
   This internship covered an area of topics in a community television station, tasks such as administration, fundraising and public relations to media content such as production, editing, scriptwriting, research crew and came with the opportunity of joining the production crews when they are producing content. More on this Gap Year here.
2. Web Designer - Ghana, Africa
   This placement was with a professional design firm in Ghana. Accomodation on the visit would be in either a guest house but was most likely to be with a host family where you would live with a family, perhaps a family whom are to do with the design firm for a real experience of life in Ghana. This placement had the ability to teach new skills such as web technologies and how hardware worked, but more media related topics too such as user experiences when on websites to finding content for the websites to use. More on this Gap Year here.
3. Photography - Argentina
    This placement was set-up with professional photography tutors in Argentina. The skill level was not an issue as the tutors could teach from beginners to advanced. Argentina has a lot of nice natural landscapes and wildlife and this was a great opportunity for anybody wanting to take up a profession in photography. More on this Gap Year here.

The aim for this is that the poster would appeal and stand out on the display board so that students would be interested in either taking the course and a gap year for Sixth Form, or current students would be interested in taking a gap year after studying this course in Sixth Form.

Our group succesfully completed our work for the display board, we felt to a professional standard and we included some interaction with the products we created in our group of three. Daniel created a suitcase which could be opened when placed on the board and shown the stuff that you should take with you with the costs of some of these things, Danielle created a passport which you could open and had some important information about gap years as well as some finance information in there.

I think that our group worked really well on this subject and I feel that we have advertised taking a gap year succesfully as a whole class I feel we have done great in showing potential Media National students the wide range of options open to students after completing the course.