Friday Mindset #139

Happy Friday, fellow travellers.

Thanks to everyone who turned up to or free online session about effective target setting. Hope you found it useful! We’ve sent out the powerpoint to everyone who requested it via Wetransfer, so please get in touch if your firewall has blocked it and we’ll find an alternative method. OK. Let’s go.

This is our penultimate newsletter of 2024… one more next week then we’re crawling, exhausted, towards the final days of term.

Stay strong, keep reading, and watch out for a hilarious joke towards the end. Right, let’s dive in…

Something to try...

We’ve become increasingly interested in ways to strengthen student commitment and proactivity recently. You’ll have noticed. (You might be rolling your eyes right now! If so, we’re sorry for the repetition…) If you see the value, here’s a resource you might want to consider using. It’s produced by Luminate - who have a graduate data analysis arm, supporting Higher Education with reports, feedback and data-insights. This is their annual report for 2024-25. It’s called What Do Graduates Do?

The introduction covers a general overview of where graduates end up working, what kind of industries and regions. Fair enough, all good stuff.

What really grabbed us, though, were the subject-specific pages. Want to see what Philosophy graduates go on to do with their lives? Or Geographers? There’s a page of data for most degree types, and they look like this:

So if you’ve ever been faced with, “What do you do with a history degree sir? Like just… teach history?” you can respond with… ‘Current figures show 12% of History graduates becomes teachers. Here’s what the others go on to do in their careers…’

Useful, eh? We’re going to be using a selection of them as departmental displays - all part of building vivid cognitive maps so students understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, and where their endeavour is leading them. They’ll improve your IAG, and make good tutorial sessions too.

Check out the full report here:

Something we're reading...

This is an old paper, and one we’ve used many times before, particularly in staff meetings. We dug it out for a conference recently, gave it a polish and re-presented it - thus the paper for you to read, but also the explanatory powerpoint.

It’s a superb study of how students pick up on the behaviours of adults. They copy what we model! Here’s the paper itself:

And here’s a super-quick powerpoint explainer. It’s a cracker:

Our latest offer...

Martin’s latest collaboration is a book called The Backpacker’s Guide to University, written with an undergrad and post-grad university teacher of twelve years. Part of the preparation phase for the book was buying and reading every currently published guide to university study. Once read, we gave them away to you lot. Last week we found we still had a couple left, so it’s Christmas present time! We’re giving away a copy of Andy Hunt’s Surviving and Thriving at University.

It’s comprehensive, detailed, very thorough, and helpful. We’ve read it, digested it, and we’re ready to hand it on to whoever wants it next. First to email [email protected] and leave us a school address gets it posted out to them.

Bargain!

Right, that’s it for now folks. Let’s stop stollen* and get the hell out of here.

All the best to you and yours,

Steve, Martin and Tony

*Stalling. Stollen. It’s a Christmas pun. Come on, work with us here, jeez, you’re a tough crowd etc etc