Graduate Molly Hayes awarded George Mitchell Scholarship

Molly Hayes, a 2008 graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s School of Arts and Letters, has been awarded a 2014 George Mitchell Scholarship.

Awarded to only twelve individuals each and every year, the George Mitchell Scholarship is sponsored by the US-Ireland Alliance. The nationally aggressive award is named soon after the former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who played an crucial role in the Northern Ireland peace procedure. The scholarship is created to connect long term American leaders with Ireland, and gives tuition, accommodations, and living and travel stipends.

Hayes, who studied English and Arabic even though at Notre Dame, will use the Mitchell Scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in Irish literature at the Nationwide University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Hayes is currently the Kenya Desk Officer at the U.S. Department of State, the place she led the Washington-primarily based crisis response management for the September terrorist attack at Westgate Mall in Nairobi. Even though an undergraduate at Notre Dame in 2008, she co-founded the ND-ABROAD initiative, which aims to market safety and dignity abroad through schooling in accurate cultural sensitivity. Hayes also was a portion of restructuring Notre Dame’s orientation and re-entry programs, and she produced a documentary on sexual assault and gender issues. She designed a University Counseling Center assistance group for college students who knowledgeable trauma although abroad.

Hayes is the 1st Mitchell Scholar from Notre Dame since 2007.

Hayes’ Mitchell Scholarship was made achievable in element through his participation in Notre Dame’s Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE). CUSE provides undergraduate students in all the University’s schools opportunities for analysis, scholarship, and imaginative projects. The center also assists them in finding faculty mentors, funding and venues for the publication or presentation of their perform, and promotes applications to national Fellowship applications and prepares them in their application procedure.

Much more details on CUSE is accessible online at cuse.nd.edu.

Graduate Molly Hayes awarded George Mitchell Scholarship

Britain"s economic recovery failing to boost graduate job prospects

For any individual who came out of university this summer time, the jobs market place is fierce. Photograph: Thomas Barwick/Getty Photos

One of the a lot of things George Osborne is probably to hail in his autumn statement on Thursday is the lengthy-awaited recovery in Britain’s jobs market.

Unemployment is falling and companies enjoying resurgent demand are creating jobs that, in some locations at least, will fill the gap left by swingeing public sector cuts. But all that is probably to come as tiny relief to the swelling ranks of university leavers who have failed to safe a graduate level occupation. Nearly half of recent graduates are in non-graduate roles such as receptionist or sales assistant. A third are doing work in a minimal-skilled occupation and almost a tenth are unemployed, according to the most current official statistics.

For college students spending an average £8,000 a yr in tuition fees, the prospect of ending up in bar function or on a factory floor is a grim 1 – but by no indicates remote. The rise in these failing to get a graduate role, to 47% this yr from 37% in 2001, displays a regular enhance in the number of graduates more than the past ten years and a drop in the quantity of jobs obtainable typically during and because the recession.

A degree nonetheless brings increased chances of employment and, sooner or later, larger earnings. But for any person who came out of university this summer time, the jobs market is fierce. One particular of the troubles dealing with this most current cohort of university leavers is that they are competing for jobs with graduates from earlier years who failed to discover function throughout the downturn.

“Simply because all vacancies have been challenging to come by … there is pent-up demand [from graduates] in the marketplace,” says Stephen Isherwood, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR).

Companies say the difficulties faced by graduates do not merely stem from a lack of vacancies. Numerous argue that universities are not turning out the employees they want and they are calling on Osborne to address the abilities gaps.

Richard Halstead is regional director for manufacturers’ organisation EEF in the Midlands, exactly where he says the sector is enjoying a renaissance but needs more experienced workers.

Some graduates are plainly a lot more “highly rewarded” than other folks. The official information shows a huge divergence in earnings. Medication graduates earn most with regular gross salaries of £46,000, even though engineering graduates comply with with £42,000. Bottom of the table are media and details research graduates on £21,000 a year.

Subject decision also appears to have a large bearing on employability. Here media and information research graduates get a far better deal, 2nd on the employment fee league table behind medication. Languages, arts and humanities are bottom.

With this kind of divergences in salary and employment rates and tuition fees very likely to rise, specialists predict college students will grow to be shrewder about their selection of degree and university.

For individuals who have previously completed, 1 trend that is emerging is entrepreneurship. The variety of graduates beginning their very own firms has risen by a lot more than a third in excess of the past yr, in accordance to the web site Freelancer.co.uk.

The chancellor’s message for this most current generation of graduates will no doubt be that faster growth indicates much more jobs – and he could supply a improve to prospects by ditching or lowering employers’ nationwide insurance coverage contributions for youthful staff. But they need to keep their optimism in check out, warns John Philpott, director of The Jobs Economist consultancy.

“The employment outlook for graduates must enhance in the following 12 months offered indicators that the hiring rate is returning to pre-economic downturn ranges. However, it could consider several many years prior to demand for graduates is robust enough to trigger important development in graduate pay,” he says.

Britain"s economic recovery failing to boost graduate job prospects

Police are cracking down on students – but what threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate?

A protester towards the proposed closure of the ULU student union final week. Photograph: Paul Davey/Demotix/Corbis

Why are some of the most powerful men and women in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, take into account a number of recent information stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are hunting for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against paying cuts and other “student-union variety things”. Meanwhile, in London final Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested right after a tiny and schedule demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the exact route of the protest – even even though it was on campus.

The 24-year-old has considering that been freed – on the strict condition that he doesn’t “engage in protest on any University Campus and not inside of half a mile boundary of any university”. Even with a copy of the bail grant in front of me, I cannot make out no matter whether that applies to any London school, any British university – or just any institute of larger training anyplace in the planet. As total-time head of the University of London’s pupil union, Chessum’s work is partly to protest: the police are blocking him from doing his function. But I suppose there’s no telling just what risk to law and order may well be posed by an above-articulate background graduate.

While we’re trawling for the ridiculous, let us keep in mind an additional incident this summer time at the University of London, when a 25-yr-old lady was arrested for the crime of chalking a slogan on a wall. Which is correct: dragged off by the police for creating in water-soluble chalk. Presumably, there would have been no bother had she utilized PowerPoint.

It all sounds farcical – it is farcical – till you delve into the information. Consider the London demo that landed Chessum in such bother: university employees had been filming their personal students from a balcony of Senate Property (the developing that inspired the Ministry of Reality in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, appropriately ample). Such surveillance is a current tradition, the nice man in the University press office explains to me – and if the police wanted the footage that would be no difficulty.

That website link with the police is turning out to be more and more essential across far more and more of our universities. London college students allege that officers and university security guards co-ordinate their attempts to rein in demonstrations even though personnel comment on the increased police presence close to campus. At Sussex, pupil protests against outsourcing companies had been broken up this April, when the university named in the police – who duly turned up with riot vans and dogs. A comparable point happened at Royal Holloway university, Surrey in 2011: a little number of college students occupied 1 measly corridor to demonstrate against course closures and redundancies the management barely bothered to negotiate, but cited “overall health and safety” and called in the police to clear away the young folks paying out their salaries.

For most of my existence, pupil politics has been little more than a joke – the things of Neil off the Young Ones, or apprentice Blairites. But in the previous few years it has all of a sudden grow to be each significant and admirable, most notably with the protests of 2010 towards £9,000 tuition fees and the university occupations that followed. And at just that stage, both the police and university management have turn into really jumpy.

For the police, this is element of the age-outdated work of clamping down on feasible sources of civil disobedience. But the inspiration for the universities is considerably much more challenging. Their historic role has been to foster intellectual inquiry and host debate. Yet in the brave new market place of larger education, when universities are competing with each other to be the two conveyor belts to the jobs marketplace and vehicles for personal investment, such dissent is not only awkward – it truly is dangerously uncommercial. As Andrew McGettigan, writer of The Wonderful University Gamble, puts it: “Anything at all also disruptive gets in the way of the business strategy.”

Final month it appeared that Edinburgh University had forced its student union to sign a gagging clause (now withdrawn). No union officer is permitted to make any public criticism of the university with out providing at least 48 hours’ recognize. University managers reportedly made that a deal-breaker if the student union was to get any money.

The managers of the University of London want to shut down the student union at the finish of this academic yr. The strategy – which is why Chessum and co were marching final week – is to maintain the swimming pool and the a variety of sports activities clubs, but to quash all university-wide pupil representation. Right after all, the college students are only the people paying the salary of the university vice-chancellor, Adrian Smith – why should they get a say? The prepare, it could not shock you to understand, was drawn up by a panel that did not quantity a single pupil. What with sky-substantial costs and rocketing rents in the capital, you might feel that the require for a pan-London student entire body had in no way been larger. But then, you are not a university manager on a 6-figure salary.

The place universities have been historically spots of free expression, now they are having to sacrifice that function for the sake of the cost-free marketplace. For college students, that comes in the form of a crackdown on dissent. However the twentysomethings at university now will end up running our politics, our firms and our media. You might want these long term leaders to be questioning and concerned about society. Or you might wonder whether sending in the police to arrest a lady chalking a wall is proportionate. Either way, you ought to be troubled.

Police are cracking down on students – but what threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate?