Hello, my name is Julia Cann and I am a Lecturer in Taxation and I'm also the
Admissions Tutor for the BSc in Accounting and Finance. Welcome to the
open day presentation for that degree. AQs I'm sure you're aware at the University
of Birmingham our accounting and finance degree is a three year degree. It has two
key aims - the first aim is to make sure that students studying and when they
graduate have a really good, solid understanding and knowledge of key
accounting, financial and other business concepts that will help them in their
future careers, and the second aim is to develop the personal skills of those
students. Personal skills are skills that we call soft skills such as their
teamwork skills their leadership skills, presentation skills and so on and so
forth, all of which are crucial to successful business careers. So to the
first aim - the achievement of a good solid knowledge and understanding of key
accounting finance and business concepts. Throughout the three years of the degree
you will be studying core subjects so in year one, two and three you will have a
number of different core subjects to study, some of which follow all three
years some of which are independent to each particular year. So for example, a
typical module that would cover or a typical subject that would cover all
three years would be management accounting you'll have an introduction
to management accounting in year one, in year two this is further built upon and
in year three because of your sound understanding of the concepts of
management accounting that you've picked up in years 1 and 2 you will be able to
use that knowledge in practical simulations of business environments and
this is something that we think is quite important at Birmingham University
certainly on our degree, because it's all very well learning the theory but we
also like to see you putting it into practice as well. We have other modules
which are core modules that you study in just one particular
year and what these do is give you an understanding of the wider business
environment. So, for example, in year one you would study a module called business
organization, in year two other modules that you might study would be human
resources and marketing all of which will add to your understanding of how
business works in general. In year three there are the opportunities to take some
optional modules together with the core modules that you must do in year three
and these optional modules are wonderful because by the time you get to year
three you will have an understanding of what you really enjoy about accounting
and finance and you'll be able to study some of those subjects in much more
detail within these optional modules which will aid your understanding and
hopefully your enjoyment of the study and may also help you in your future
chosen career. Teaching is carried out in three main methods, firstly you will have
lectures and lectures are usually two hours in length lectures are with the
entire undergraduate degree cohort so it could be up to 200 students in the same
lecture theatre as you at the same time. The next level of teaching is seminars
and what seminars do is they take smaller groups of students for maybe an
hour and a half to two hours at a time and give those students the opportunity
to further look into elements that have been taught during a previous lecture.
Finally we have classes and classes tend to be even smaller in size so you may
have no more than 25 students in a class and this allows you to have even more
contact time with your lecturer or your teaching provider because where you have
a small number of students in a class you can be asking questions, discussing
issues and developing your understanding and knowledge of the subject in much
more detail on a more one-to-one basis. With regard to teaching hours, you have
approximately 15 to 18 teaching hours per week - we call that
contact time, and this means that you could have 15 to 18 in total and
lectures seminars and classes the rest of the week. We expect you to do some
individual study, obviously to further read around the subjects that you have been
learning about during your lectures and further discussing and investigating in
seminars and classes. The degree is assessed in many different ways, most of
the degree in approximately eighty percent of it at present, is assessed by
means of unseen written exam or class tests. Now class tests could be multiple
choice tests or they could be written class tests, exams could be anything
between one hour to three hours in length. The rest of the assessment - the
remaining twenty percent roughly speaking - is carried out in a number of
different ways, so you could need to write an essay individually, you may need
to write an essay in a group or you may need to do a presentation individually
or in a group. The last type of assessment that we've recently
introduced is the production of a poster which is probably a little bit more
enjoyable than writing an essay. The second aim of the degree is to develop
the skills that you're going to need for your future career. We hear from
potential employers more and more often that although a good academic knowledge
is required for potential employees, employers are looking more and more in
depth at the type of person that they are employing because they need that
person to have certain skills such as the ability to communicate, the ability
to think outside the box, and these are the sort of skills that we try to help
you develop over the three years of your course at Birmingham. There are certain
modules on the degree that assist you in the development of these skills and we
start these modules off almost at day one - so for example in the first year you'll
be studying an academic and professional skills module and what this requires you
to do is to get into a group of other first years and present to a group of
industry experts an argument for a business that you want to start up - it's
a bit like Dragons Den, only on a slightly more friendly basis. What this
requires you as a group to do is many things, so for example you're going to be
working with people that you've probably never spoken to before so you've got to
be able to communicate with them, you're going to need to work together so you
need to assimilate teamwork, you're going to need to maybe get somebody in charge
to make sure that everybody is doing the right thing at the right time, so that's
got to be a little bit of leadership skills, and then in addition to that
you've got to prepare and give a presentation and everybody has to
participate in the presentation to people who you've never seen before, now
this all might sound a little bit scary at this point in time but think about it -
if you get the opportunity to do these activities and take on the development
of these skills whilst at university, by the time you're looking for job, doing a
presentation isn't going to be too difficult and bearing in mind that in
this day and age most employers require you to do a presentation in order to get
a job at their organization, practicing these skills and developing these skills
at university where it's essentially just a playground for these skills is a
really good opportunity to grasp with both hands and run with. Another activity
that we expect our first years to do is participate at our outward bound
activity center at Lake Coniston. At the beginning of your three-year degree here
you'll be split up into groups of about 40 students and you'll go to Lake
Coniston for three to four days. Whilst at Lake Coniston you'll be put
into teams and you'll be doing all sorts of different types of activities, both
physical, strategy, mental allowing you again to develop certain skills and make
new friendships. It is a wonderful opportunity for you to
make lasting friendships because you'll be working in teams and you'll be
understanding by the end of the three days in Coniston how other people think
how other people work and this will allow you when you have to do group work
in the future to have a solid base of friends essentially to do such group
work with. The other thing that it will allow you to do is to make a good
friendship with lecturers because it's not only students that go up to Lake
Coniston to the outward bound activity center, lecturers go as well and we
participate in the activities with you, we go out on the canoes, we do the
orienteering, we go mountain biking with you, so that we can get to know you
students as well as you get to know us and what that means is you have a focus
in the department if you need somebody to talk to because you will know at
least one lecturer particularly well having met them for a long time and
participated in activities with them at Lake Coniston. We appreciate within the
department that going to university is actually quite a big step - leaving home
possibly for the first time and certainly for three years is a challenge
at least, so what this means is we try to make your life a little bit easier when
you come to university - we have a personal tutoring scheme where every
single student from day one of being on our degree is allocated a personal tutor.
Now that personal tutor stays with that student for the three years at
University and that personal tutor is like their University parent or carer so
to speak, so if the student has any issues whatsoever, be it having an issue
relating to academics, be it having an issue relating to finance, be it not
knowing how to work a washing machine for example, the student can go and ask
this personal tutor and the personal tutor may not be able to answer the
question but can certainly point the student in the direction of somebody who
can. The other thing that we are enormously proud
within the Department of Accounting, and this is one of the few departments that
do this, is our student-run mentoring system. This is something that the
students have developed because they feel that it would be very useful for
students in upper years to give help and guidance to students in lower years and
as a result we have year two and year three students who guide and mentor
those students in year one to make their journey into settling into university a
whole heap easier. So, most students go to university in order to obtain a good
qualification to allow them to get an excellent job and a very very good
career in the future and we're conscious that we want to help you do this. Within
our department we have very good links with industry and with professional
organisations. Many of us have worked in Big Four and many of us still retain our
links and our networks to Big Four organisations, not to mention other
organisations that we have worked in in the past. Be aware that just because it's
accounting and finance degree, it isn't just accountancy that you can go into
because what we are conscious of is that it's a good basis for business in
general, so we have students going into such occupations as investment banking,
in retail management, obviously in accounting in consultancy not to mention
a number of them that set up their own businesses once finishing university. We
have modules designed to help you achieve a good professional career, so
for example in year three we have a module called the professional
development module and that module encourages you to obtain an internship
between year two and three and having obtained that internship requires you to
reflect upon the experience of that internship, and how that experience is
firstly going to help you in the rest of your degree and how it's going to frame
your future career. The University of Birmingham has
recently won the Times and Sunday Times University Graduate Employment of the
Year award and this is because we have an excellent facility called a Careers
Network which gives students great support in the acquisition of
internships and graduate placements. Each College has a dedicated careers network
and our dedicated careers network is that of the College of Social Sciences.
The College of Social Sciences careers network assists students in the writing
of CVs, in the preparation for psychometric testing, in the preparation
for telephone interviews and face-to-face interviews and also in the
preparation for presentations for assessment centers, so you can rest
assured you'll be given great support in the process of applying for and
practicing for job interviews and job opportunities. I really hope that this
presentation has been useful to you and has given you some information relating
to the degree that you will find useful in deciding whether you want to come to
Birmingham to do accounting and finance or not. Just remember a couple of things -
we want you to come to this university and graduate as a confident,
knowledgeable and happy person who's going to be successful in your future
career and we want to make sure that over your time here you've developed
skills that will not just help you in your first job but will help you in your
second and third and any future job after that. I hope it's been useful and I
look forward to seeing some of you at our open days in future, our AVDs and so
on and so forth, thank you.