The Edinburgh Award, and it transpires that self reflection really isn’t my strong point

2^nd entry: 22^nd October

I said that the last entry would be short, but my impressive capacity to ramble endlessly reared its ugly head. Hopefully this will be more to the point, especially as it larges focuses on my inability to self reflect.

To explain. Now, in fairness, when I started this project, I really didn’t imagine that it was going to be all about personal growth and reflection. More like trying to trying to avoid a roomful of teenagers rioting in boredom and throwing paperclips at my head (or was it just me that that happened to in high school?) But for those of us that have elected to tie the Pro Science scheme in with The Edinburgh Award, that’s exactly what it’s meant to be about.

The Edinburgh Award is a very new programme. It basically intends to create a means of recognizing officially the volunteer work that lots of students already undertake alongside their studies, and in doing so giving those students an edge on the (currently absolutely terrifying) job market. There’s a catch though. It’s not enough to just complete the volunteer work to get the Award. You’ve got to be aware, to the last degree, of exactly what personal skills you are developing, and exactly how and why you are doing so.  Apparently graduate personal awareness is like crack to prospective employers nowadays.

Bringing me to our training session. We were with Neil again, but this time only for an hour, and in the Central area. So we really had no excuse for not being on top form. Now, it might sound insanely easy to write a list of skills you want to develop, and then to order them according to what you consider to be your strongest points and those that need the most progress, and then finally to pick three that you really prioritise. But seriously, try being given a sheet of paper and told to do just that. I hadn’t even realised that I had any skills and attributes, except perhaps the rather dubious tendency to take on more than I can mange, which is hardly a virtue anyway. I had no idea. I make good brownies? I’m a reasonably competent waitress?

No, the sort of things that we were after here was more in the line of ‘communication skills’, ‘public speaking’, ‘creativity’ and ‘self awareness’. All virtues that come under the rather vague category of ‘graduate skills’ – those highly transferable and subject-independent skills that we will all have supposedly gained after squeezing ourselves through 4 years of University. This actually brings up quite an interesting discussion that cropped up before we had to write out all these lists of just how skilled we were. The gist was this: was the subject that you were studying actually directly relevant to the area that you were going on to work in? To be honest, I far as I could tell the answer was pretty obvious – it just completely depends. You don’t want an engineer who doesn’t have the first clue about fluid mechanics designing a pump system, any more than you’d want to have an anaesthetist whose idea of putting you to sleep is to have you down several shots of tequila. Then again, how many English students actually go onto become authors? Surely it’s more the fact that they’ve learnt how to piece together a coherent piece of writing, how to research and how to apply themselves that most of them will use to find work? Whatever your opinion on that debate, it did open up the question of those all important ‘graduate skills’ that the Edinburgh Award is meant to be honing for us.

This is something else that I feel quite strongly about. No offense to universities or students in general intended (that really would be a case of shooting myself in the foot)  but I feel that ‘graduate skills’ is really quite a woolly term that applies to the skill set that you (hopefully) pick up from applying yourself to any degree. I’d imagine that those include the ability to focus and to self motivate, to think laterally and creatively, and to have a really in-depth understanding of a field or subject, as well as maybe developing broader interests. Here’s my problem though – I profoundly believe that it is not necessary to go to university to achieve these things. Anyone that puts themselves through a rigorous process that does not involve being spoon fed by someone else would develop the same skill set (in my opinion). That could be anything from an apprenticeship, to a challenging internship, to thorough vocational training (try telling me professional dancers aren’t self motivated and creative) or even finding a job abroad. I really feel that this notion of ‘graduate skills’ – that you can only get these worthy skills by sitting through 3 or more years of university – is complete nonsense.

Having gotten that off my chest, I’ll now backtrack slightly by saying that of course, doing a university degree that you really care about is a brilliant way of developing these what I’d actually generalise to ‘life skills’. Now how is my rant even remotely relevant? Maybe it wasn’t, but I just wanted to establish that I’m not selling the idea that it is only undergraduates that magnanimously volunteer for a couple of hours here and there that are going to achieve these ‘skills’. I don’t think that’s the case for a moment. But I do think that the spirit of Pro Science, and indeed of the Edinburgh Award, is very much that it is OK to be interested in and to aspire to something that isn’t easily attainable – a concept, I think that is really out of fashion in Britain at the moment – although our post-Olympic glow does seem to have changed that slightly. I don’t think anyone is labouring under the delusion that Mo Farrah or Ellie Simmonds spend most of their time moping about on Facebook.

Sticking to subject clearly isn’t part of my personal skills set, those poor kids better be patient! I do think that it will be very interesting to see how my perspective of my own personal skills and development changes over the course of the next year from the perspective of the Edinburgh Award (because just in case I gave it away, I tend towards the side of cynicism with all these endlessly self-reflective analyses that have become so popular now, even though most people by and large don’t pay them any real attention. Remember those ‘self assessment forms they kept giving you at school? Exactly. Point made.) Also, because despite all my ranting and rambling, I’m really keen to give the Edinburgh Award a try. And who knows? By the end of the year, perhaps I, and the rest of the Pro Science team, will have become so refined at self-reflection and analysis that we’ll never be unemployable again . . .