From the Careers Department

Beyond school – the leavers : 2004-2005

Spurred on by the success of last year’s leaver group, this year’s Upper Sixth students researched possible areas of study with enthusiasm and dedication. They applied for a wide variety of courses in the United Kingdom, North America, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. Then the anxious wait for replies started. Responses from the UK universities were later than usual this year but, by the time their external exams started, a picture was beginning to form. They now have exciting offers, definite or conditional, from a range of well-known and respected universities, including Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial College and London School of Economics in the UK, the universities of McGill and British Columbia in Canada, and the universities of Pennsylvania, Brigham Young and Illinois in North America.

It is interesting to note that the students did not restrict themselves to general topics for future study but examined the minutiae of specialist courses in their chosen fields, investigating, for example, aeronautical engineering, sports equipment engineering and law with language options.

Some of the year group will have difficult decisions to make once the results come out, holding as they do a range of tempting offers.

The Leavers of 2005 – spread of interest

Geographical

The Leavers of 2005 – spread of interest

Proposed fields of study

During the year representatives from overseas universities have visited the school, including from University College London, Nottingham and Newcastle (UK), and Harvard, Boston College and the University of Pennsylvania (USA). The universities of York, McGill and British Columbia came from Canada, and interested students took the opportunity of visiting an exhibition of Australian Higher Education held outside the school. We are pleased to welcome back old friends from these institutions but also to see new faces from universities like Harvard including us in their programmes as they build up their contacts in the region. They expressed their real interested in schools like BISC who offer the British GCSE then the IB for the Sixth Form. BISC is he only school in Cairo that offers that.

Representatives of Admission Departments in overseas universities continue to assure us of the value they place on the full IB Diploma as a preparation for study at university, and employment literature in the UK constantly emphasises the importance of a skill-based education for success in the international labour market our students will enter after graduation from higher education.

Further down the school

For the Lower Sixth, the Personal Profile process piloted last year has enabled them to tackle the individual planning required for the challenge of university application in September. Now integrated into the Lower Sixth Personal and Social Development programme, the materials can be adapted and refined in the future to suit different student needs.

For the third year running the EuroQuest aptitude tests were used to support subject choice in S5, producing the same enthusiastic response from students and parents as in previous years. S3 tacked the issue as a year group when they explored the links between subject and subject and between subject groups and careers with excitement and noisy debate. Once again the senior students in the Primary showed breathtaking knowledge and awareness of the vocabulary of occupations and job content for their age when taking part in career games in class.

All students in the school were aware that they could take advantage of the open access approach to careers, feeling free to come to the Careers Room to ask questions about courses, job areas and subject choice whenever the need arose.