I took some lonely selfies

Since I haven’t had the luck of finding my group again, up until a few seconds ago at least, which means I had to take my selfies as they are supposed to be – by myself. All alone. Here they are!

The first one is obviously in the Perry Library, which is where you can find books on pretty much any subject, and if you prefer studying somewhere quiet, you can do that there as well!

The second picture is taken just outside of the Business Faculty offices which is where I should go for various reasons like handing in school work, getting my bank letter and other queries regarding my time here. One thing being updating my mother’s phone number to not be the same as mine.

The third and last selfie is taken just outside of Grand Master Aziz’s office. Here I actually was less lonely, because I at least had found another class mate. He was not from my group though. Oh, and I also had gotten myself a coffee between this picture and the previous one!

if (Student.IsDisabled) { // Do stuff }

The university offers help for disabled students, so I thought I should write a little bit about it.

What is DSA?

DSA stands for Disabled Students’ Allowances, and it is an allowance higher education students living in England can apply for if they have either a mental health condition, disability, long-term health condition or specific learning difficulty like dyscalculia or dyslexia. Recipients of DSA will get varying amounts of money to aid them in their school work.

How can you get yourself assessed?

To get yourself assessed for disabilities you have to be fully enrolled. Of course there are third party advisors, but they are rather pricey. You also have to “have a reasonable amount of time left on your course”. The process is divided into three appointments and you have to attend all of them. To book an appointment it is easiest to get in contact with them through phone, by calling 020 7815 6454 or by emailing disability@lsbu.ac.uk. A viable option is also to visit Student Life Centre’s Helpdesk located in the Student Centre.

What Support is available?

Of course there are different help for different disabilities, for example people with dyslexia are generally advised to get extra time during exams or getting their work assessed differently to counter their disability.

A list of three things student services provide us with

1. Skills for learning
2. Library resources
3. IT Support

The JobShop

The JobShop Online is located on this website, and this is probably one of the easier places to get yourself a job. Obviously I have signed up, and I have also started looking around for work. Since none of the current vacancies are of interest for me, I will be writing about the one that seemed a bit funny to me.

London South Bank University, an employer unbeknown to me, seems to be looking for a Student Telethon Caller, whatever that is. Anyways, the job is part-time and located somewhere in Greater London. The start date is 13/10/2014 and the duration is 1-3 months, and you will be working evenings. To apply you are required to understand things, have no problem with rejection, possess the ability to pay attention and also to appreciate and understand diversity and equality among other criteria.

Edit: To contact the Employability Service you can either waddle in to the JobShop in the Student Centre, give them a call at 020 7815 6427 or send them an email to careers@lsbu.ac.uk.

Edit 2: I just found some careers that seem rather interesting to me, one being an IT consultant, which is a super generic answer, but that would mean would get to work with an array of different people and on hopefully on some interesting projects. It also pays quite well! The other career is also quite generic – working as a web developer. To work on something that potentially is available to everyone around the globe and make it a functioning product to me seems fascinating as well. It would also be a good step forward to allow me to work on complete solutions, which my ultimate goal is.

Student Enterprise at LSBU

In this post I will briefly discuss some of the aspects of Student Enterprise that may be beneficial to students at LSBU.

Among other things Student Enterprise offer the Entrepreneurship in Action Scheme, or EiA for short, which will boost you start-up with £500, mentoring, guidance, hot desk space and an opportunity for further funding if the first £500 was not enough.

Furthermore they also host competitions, with the two main ones being the Pitching Competition as well as Make It Happen. The winner in the prior will receive £500 for business development and the latter will not only win £1000 but also office space for a whole year.

Student Enterprise also host an array of events ranging from Networking to PR & Knowing your Brand and Intellectual Property, only naming a few.

After writing this post I actually signed up for their event on freelancing in November, because I, in fact, am a freelancer and I could probably need some help with that.

Hello, World!

My name is Kristoffer, the blonde one, and I usually go by Kris. I am doing my first year of a Bsc focused on Information Technology, and on the side I develop apps and also do my own business back home in Sweden developing help applications for a live streaming company.  This purpose of this blog is to have somewhere post things that may or may not be interesting to people – but hopefully being of interest to the tutor.

As of now, though I’m still a novice, I do well enough with .NET, mostly using C# for developing applications. My background is fairly thin there, but every day is a step forward to becoming more knowledgeable in the field. I have also dabbled a bit with web development with JavaScript, PHP, HTML and CSS, though I would not call myself fluent there, by any stretch.

I am aspiring to develop complete solutions for companies, schools, universities – anyone really – to make their days just a little easier. The main complaints I’ve heard about software solutions are two: they’re not complete in the sense that mobile support is lacking or non-existent, and that they’re far to complex for the task at hand. To provide a simple solution, which is accessible any where, on any device, is what I want to provide.

 

The Marshmallow Challange

Before I do the individual reflection, this post is going to need a little back story.

The first assignment was to do the Marshmallow Challenge, which really is an easy challenge. You are provided with 20 straws of spaghetti, one meter of masking tape, one pair of scissors and supposedly a piece of string. I did not see the string, but there are tales of its existence. The group is divided into groups of approximately four people and they are tasked with building a structure which is the tallest while still being able to hold a marshmallow on the top of it (or wherever really, but you want the marshmallow to be as high as possible as it is the point of measure). For this the teams are given 18 minutes. To read more about it, you can visit the official page by clicking here, or copying and pasting this link into your web browser:

http://marshmallowchallenge.com/Welcome.html

Down below is my individual reflection.

I guess everyone reacts differently to challenges, I generally try to embrace them. I enjoy a good challenge. I got a little hyped up, and having done something similar I felt somewhat confident. We started right away, with creating triangles, with somewhat of a plan – triangles on the horizontal plane and having cut up pasta straws on the vertical plane. We started off with everyone trying to make triangles, which the person in the middle then taped together.

In hindsight, we realised we should have done some things differently. Because we built everything to be about the same width, the structure quickly got unstable – when you have the centre of mass up high, the base needs to be wider or anchored properly. We did neither. Building upon that we were not super good with tape either, and the pasta straws were not as precise as we would have wanted them to be. We figured we should have done some things differently, one thing being prototyping, another being building in more of a pyramid like structure. But all and all it went okay, we got it to stand for ten seconds, and I got a picture of it!

Edit: The name of my group is Brains – Ground Zero and it consists of me, Nathan, Franz and Sulekha.