Life after College 2013

During the Summer Holidays i decided to better myself and take a two week course that the college had newly set up. The course brought in lecturers and teaches from different backgrounds to help us develop our skills and teach us new ones. In Life after college they taught us about really important things that you may not have fully thought about or don’t know enough about. Things like setting up your own business but going into much more detail about it such as which legal structure you would be, would you be a limited company? A sole trader? If so what would happen to you if you were to be unfortunately bankrupt? How could you protect yourself as a business? We had professional speakers in who have given advice for years and even some that have learned the hard way and had business’s fail. They also spoke about tax, copywriting, insurance, pricing. One speaker taught us to think completely differently in a good way on becoming a free lance artist, you have to work out how much your work and your time is worth because if you don’t have an hourly rate of pay and a certain deadline to create things you will end up loosing profit and also loosing clients at the same time. This is just a small part of what I learnt from the two weeks at Life after college, I will defiantly be attending next year and keeping touch with the contacts I have made and the contacts I have made through staff too.

I took it upon myself to create a facebook group for the people that attended I contacting Louise in Marketing and asked her to sent me a list of everyones email address's so she did and I sent out a link for everyone to join and added names on facebook I could remember. I'm really glad I set up the page as it is a good place to go to advertise jobs and look for people of different specialisations. For example if I ever need a photographer I could go there, or a graphic designers opinion on my new logo, or I could ask one of the textiles bunch to design a nice colourful business card for me. this event was so valuable and seriously gave me so many contacts that I know I will be in touch with for a while.
They also gave us a huge portfolio of information that I filled full of things during the two weeks. I learnt everything from starting up your own business to writing a good CV to  even practising interview techniques on camera, they really went the extra mile with this and I'm glad I did it at the end of my second year because I feel like now I have a head start in knowing what I want more from year three and PPP.

Here is a screenshot of the facebook page I made for everyone -