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Wow. Well, what a lot has changed since I wrote my last mid-year update of my final year at Birmingham City University. I can remember writing the post at the start of March on my commute back from Birmingham, blissfully unaware of what was about to ensue. As it has now been over 6 weeks since my last deadline and I have since had my last marks back (awaiting my official degree certificate), I feel now is the time to summarise my final semester and to conclude my final-year university experience.
For my final semester, the UK was in lockdown. My university suspended face to face teaching before lockdown, and chose to run the remaining lectures and seminars via MS Teams and through PPT's with audio commentary. The success of these was mixed, one module leader had this sussed out and provided really valuable online resources, my other module leader seemed to be less familiar with this new technology and encountered many embarrassing technical hitches. Thankfully, due to the COVID-situation, we were given extensions on a couple of my deadlines, meaning that I was given a 2-week extension for my dissertation, which was handed in (digitally) on the 15th May.
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I'll be honest, not having to commute for what ended up being 3.5 hours each day (door-to-door) ended up being a god-send for my grades and workload. I found myself with an extra 10 hours to a usual uni-week which meant I could properly knuckle down to write my dissertation and do my research.
Semester 2 and 3 of my final year had initially consisted of 8 hours of contact time; 1 hour of contact time for Dissertation (a 1-hour lecture), a 1-hour workshop and 2-hour workshop for One Planet Business and 2 x 2-hour seminars for Contemporary Advertising.
The One Planet Business module covered the issues of ethics, social responsibility and sustainability and the social and environmental impact of business and marketing decisions. This module consisted of a 3000-word report that set out to identify the nature and extent of the challenges facing organisations with a chosen sector and to identify potential approaches for addressing these in their business strategy.
My contemporary advertising module took into account the evolution of creative marketing communication tools and techniques to develop a full advertising proposal and pitch, mirroring the work that advertising agencies do, whilst critiquing current practices and theoretical concepts in order to create a campaign. This module for my second semester consisted of using my advertising brief from semester 1 to create my own advertising campaign and pitch presentation. Pre-COVID, this was to be an in-person presentation in front of a panel, but instead was to be recorded from the safety of my house and a video uploaded instead. I’ve never been overly confident with the graphic design side of marketing, however, I chose the brand KIND and enjoyed being able to use the existing branding to create my own marketing posters.
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Like many final year university students, it did appear that our last year at university has been tragically cut short and that we missed out on the final weeks and days that would have otherwise been spent taking cliche photos holding our dissertations or celebrating in the student union pub. There are many friends on my course that I am now unsure whether I will get to see again and with whom I did not get the chance to say goodbye. It is unclear whether our end of year graduation will even take place.
On a more positive note, however, I am so pleased that I was able to attain a first for every module that I completed and managed to achieve a first-class overall. I am awaiting my official final grade classification, but I should hopefully average at 80% for my entire degree, which as you can imagine I am super chuffed about.
