Time flies! I can’t believe how fast my final year is going. Half of my last semester is over! It’s time to review my three years as a York Management student. Our department organised two visit days last week and, as a student ambassador, I met lots of new faces, who are going to begin their new journey in our department this coming year. I had some really nice conversations with our students and they kept asking questions about my life in York, and also my degree course. I have talked about my experiences and my thoughts about the time I’ve spent in York in this post.
My course shapes my future
Before starting this course, I only had a brief understanding about the world of management and didn’t know just how broad management can be. The BA Management course allowed me to explore the world of management, and taught me that the role of manager is not just about managing a team, but being a leader to influence the whole company. Some of you might be wondering what the course content covers. It is more focused on organisation management and we are often asked to evaluate a chosen company. This covers the strategies they use, their organisation culture, their research and development (R&D), IT systems and more, to better understand their successes and failures.
In our final year, we chose our pathways to further develop specific skills and I chose human resource and organisation development. These two aspects of management now interest me the most due to their role in establishing a good company. Prior to my university studies, I focused on learning about marketing strategies and business finance, as I only really thought about selling products. The concept of organisation culture and human resource management had led me to study the importance of keeping valuable employees, who can in return make the company greater. The course has reshaped my future career and provided me a wider view on managing a company.
Improving my reading skills
I have to say I am not a person who enjoys reading. However, this programme requires students to do lots of reading in their spare time. During the lectures, we are taught basic theories and we have to choose the theories, that we like, and utilise in our reality situations. Reading academic articles is very important, in order to learn about different criticisms of the theory from professional perspectives and help us to build up our own viewpoint. Don’t be scared by the high amount of reading, it’s actually really interesting to link theories you have studied with real-life situations. Trust me, it’s not that bad!
Skills development at York
I have to thank the Management School so much! All the people in this department are really kind and helpful. Last summer, I participated in a Korean cosmetics marketing competition. I was quite nervous as I am not a marketing student and don’t have lots of experience in writing marketing proposals. I sought advice from my department and the marketing lecturers were kind enough to help me, using their professional experience in the marketing industry. I am very glad to have had this precious chance to learn in my area of interest and I am really happy that they were so enthusiastic when helping me. Moreover, I have been given loads of opportunities by my department, such as blog writing and being the department student ambassador. I learned so many practical skills when working with my colleagues on visit days and other events. These skills have helped me to better prepare for my future career.
There are so many best bits of my university life that I still want to include… I have done a vlog of one week of my life to capture my time in the York Management School. You are always welcome to subscribe my channel, where I will post more videos about my life!
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