About courses

So my courses started last week. Here in Leeds my studies focuses on PR and event management. I have classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but even though I have day offs I'm going to use them on studying so I'll have my weekends free.  I know my friends and family aren't going to believe this, but it's what I have to do here! Studying is quite similar as it is in Finland, but there are some differences and more work to do. I have really conflicting feelings about my courses as it seems we have a lot of reading and tasks to do, but then the topics we go through during lectures are obvious things which we have learned during our first year in Laurea. Then again, I've had only two weeks of lectures, so maybe the start just feels easy. 

One of my courses (by the way, all of them are 2nd year studies so I'm in the same position as I'd back home) is Public Relations & Events. During this semester we will learn to define, examine critically and manage PR. Besides lectures we have two big parts of the course, which is an essay in January and group assignment, both with a 50% value of total rating. In our first lecture we mostly compared different companies public images and talked about their main messages in commercials. We also discussed about the difference between PR and advertisement. Ads are something the company can control totally by paying for example TV channels, magazines or web pages to show their ads, which have been strictly designed. Then there's PR, which happens by the hands of other parties. Company or a public person can try their best to have a good public image, but if the press or maybe a contestant finds out something unpleasant then there's nothing a they can do about it. I'm really interested about this course and I believe it will be useful to know more deeply about  PR if/when entering to the business world. 

Wednesday's course Celebration, Ritual & Culture is my favorite. It explores the cultural elements of different societies and considers the role of rituals and celebrations in them. During the first two classes we've mostly just talked about all of our backgrounds and family traditions, because those are also small rituals. Many people in this class are from different countries or cultures, which is a great base for our topics. I think there are only few exchange students besides me, but many are born in somewhere else and lived in UK for years now. For example there are students originally from New Zealand, Dominican Republic, Latvia, Poland, Malaysia, Netherlands and many more. Then the backgrounds can also be religious, some are Muslim, Jewish, atheist or belong to different Christian parish. Looking forward for these topics during this semester!

My last course is Project Management and Finance. Yes, not particularly my cup of tea..... But I kind of had to choose it so the PR & Events would be available for me. The purpose of this module is to provide students to understand how important it is to have the knowledge and application of project management and finance skills in both national and international event industry. Main thing is to learn to identify, evaluate and use the mechanisms and tools in project management. It is also important to learn how to be a good team member and how to take properly care of all the financial parts, so the course will also go through those things. Maybe not my favorite one, but the theory will be useful in future. 

Unfortunately no fun photos for this post.. :D

Bye loves!<3