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A Chinese student's experience at the Information School

As a student ambassador at the Information school, my personal situation is that I have studied my undergraduate degree in the UK, but I did not study Information Management before coming here. If you are a person who has not studied at undergraduate level in the UK, a language class may be a good choice, not only improve your English ability but also help you to adapt to studying in the UK.

Before your course properly starts in the Information School, there will be a small test, where you need to write a 700-word literature review, which is not credit-bearing. The teachers will encourage you to write this essay, which will help you to find where you need to improve, to avoid low marks in next assignments. The School also arranges academic writing and digital skills courses for each student, teaching you how to write academic writing and how to use the School's website, how to search for books and so on.

Every student has a personal tutor. If you have a personal or academic problem, you can talk to your tutor about it. The Student Union at the University of Sheffield is very famous. You can participate in club activities in your spare time to enrich your life.

As we all know, the Information School ranks second in the world for Library and Information Management, and it attracts a lot of Chinese students. A number of people go to the same compulsory courses, and there are many elective courses you can choose. The assignments of the course are presented in different proportions and forms, such as 60% personal work and 40% group work in the total score for one module. Some compulsory courses also require doing a computer test.

Out of my modules, the Information System Modeling is my favorite class. Students are assigned different periods of time to attend classes. Thus, every class will contain about 40 students. Unlike in Chinese classes, before the class students need to watch the teacher's recorded course in advance. In the class, the tutor will focus more on the interaction between the teacher and the student. The teacher will sometimes assign tasks to groups. There are teaching assistants to help the tutor to answer students' questions. You can listen again to every class on MyEcho, in case you missed the lesson or have a point you do not understand. Hence, if your undergraduate’s major was not information management, like me, you don't have to worry about the lessons; you just need follow the teacher step by step in each lesson.

In addition, there are famous old elevators in Sheffield (the Arts' Tower Paternoster), the beautiful Darcy Garden, lovely alpacas, delicious Chinese food and convenient trams. Sheffield's prices are low and it is a safe place to live.

Xinyan Zhao, MSc Information Management student

(This blog is also available in Mandarin Chinese here)






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