The Lower Sixth Future Skills Day yesterday was a great success, with the morning focussing on Early Talent Recruitment, and the afternoon dealing with UCAS application preparation. James Austen, of Cohesion Recruitment, spoke about the reality of job-seeking, with top tips on how students can use their time at university to be in pole position for jobs on graduation.

With the rise of Virtual Interviews as part of the internship and job seeking programmes (and being used in university interviews too), the girls found their session on Shortlist.me extremely useful. Using this software, students can practice a range of online interviews, and then watch their performance and learn how to improve. These one-way interviews are not easy, but practice makes perfect!

In the afternoon, students registered for UCAS, and then worked in small groups to hear advice from universities on writing Personal Statements:

• Exeter Uni lead the session on Science, Maths and Business degrees
• Lancaster Uni focussed on Humanities and Art degrees
• Southampton joined us for Medical and Profession Health Care degrees

Finally, students met with subject specialist teachers to talk through the university research they have been doing this year in EGA workshops, and to get some pointers for boosting their Personal Statements over the summer.

Some comments from the students:

"It was a really informative day, thank you!", "Thank you for organising such a lovely day for us", "Thank you so much for organising this event, it is very helpful. Thank you so much for your hard work", "The day was very useful and it was exciting to get started with UCAS!".

Bethan Ferguson, Head of Bright Futures Programme