Urgent: lend a hand to the radio show
On Friday 27 April CUSU Access and CamFM are hosting a 'Q&A on Cambridge' radio show for teachers and prospective students.
The 'expert panel' will consist of:
- the CUSU Access Officer Taz Rasul,
- one of the Fitzwilliam JMA Access Officers Kerry Higgins
- and Homerton's Admissions Tutor Steve Watts.
They'll be answering questions from UK sixth form/college students and teachers about Cambridge, including how it's like to live and study here, student finance, and the admissions process.
The radio show will be turned onto a podcast on the CamFM and applytocambridge website afterwards.
There are some things that you can do immediately to make the show a success
These things are (click to learn more):
- Promote the event to state schools and teachers in your home town.
- Pre-record your own experiences and opinions to broadcast on the radio show.
1. Write home to promote the event
There's nothing better to get people attention than creating a personal connection. CUSU can't mail out to all UK schools and colleges, so we're hoping that you could email your teachers to let them know what's going on. If you went to a private school, then you could write to the state schools in your area to promote the radio show! If you don't know what exactly to write, you can edit this template text and edit it to suit you (html version below).
Dear [staff member's name],
I'm writing as a past student at [school/college name]. I left in [year] and I'm now studying [course] at the University of Cambridge.
My Students' Union helps to promote Cambridge to students and teachers from schools where going to Cambridge isn't common, and lots of Cambridge undergraduates and postgraduates volunteer to talk to school/college students about what it's like to be here.
The Students' Union has just come up with a new website specifically for teachers, www.applytocambridge.com/teachers. It's a way for teachers to learn about Cambridge through students themselves and to communicate with students to let us know what more we need to do to increase our outreach efforts in UK state schools. Cambridge University Students' Union has no targets to meet on its outreach with students, teachers and parents, so it's quite flexible to learn new things and experiment with innovative ways to engage school and college students.
I'm asking whether you could have a look at this website or forward it onto anybody in [college/school] who has responsibility for the [sixth form/ gifted and talented students/ raising aspirations/ university applications]. There's loads of information on there, as well as two free events for teachers coming up really soon – one is a radio Q&A on Cambridge that you can text in to (in April), and another is a free forum for teachers in Cambridge (in June).
So please visit www.applytocambridge.com/teachers, which is a section on Cambridge's alternative prospectus website. Let me know if you have any questions, or email the Students' Union Access Officer Taz Rasul on access@cusu.cam.ac.uk.
Best wishes and a happy Easter,
[Your Name]
2. Pre-record your experiences to broadcast on the show
We want to collate a bunch of audio-recordings by Cambridge students about:
- how teachers made the difference in your application (positive or negative);
- what your admissions interviews were like;
- what you do in your free time in Cambridge.
We want to pre-record these voxpop-type things and broadcast them during the live show, as well as putting the recordings on our alternative prospectus website applytocambridge.
If you wouldn't mind sparing a small amount of time to record a Cambridge-related experience from the heart, then please join us this Sunday for the recording in the CamFM studio.
Here's the Facebook event and a PDF advert (for those without Facebook).