Study in the UK

In terms of popularity with international students, the UK overall lags only behind the considerably larger US – unsurprising given the strong global reputation enjoyed by UK universities. An impressive 71 UK universities feature in the 2013/14 QS World University Rankings®, with four currently ranked among the world’s top ten.
The University of Cambridge is currently ranked the third best university in the world, while its historic rival the University of Oxford is at number six. Filling the places between are the UK capital’s top two, University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London. Overall, there are a total of 29 UK higher education institutions in the global top 200, and 61 in the top 700. A shortage of options, then, will not be an issue if you’re looking to study in the UK.

Universities in the UK

Higher education in the UK varies depending on the constituent state (England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland), though the systems are fairly similar. Undergraduate degrees at universities in the UK typically last three years, although courses in Scotland are usually a year longer. Some UK universities also offer fast-track undergraduate courses which can be completed in as little as two years. You could also choose a vocational-based ‘foundation degree’, which typically lasts one or two years and is similar to the US associate’s degree.
Students in the UK start their higher education with a bachelor’s degree, although for some subjects you can enroll on an undergraduate degree that leads directly into a master’s program – usually four years long. Master’s programs last one or two years, and PhDs at least three. Courses are taught in English at most universities in the UK, with some Welsh-language programs offered in Wales, Scottish Gaelic-language programs in Scotland and Irish Gaelic-language programs in Ireland.

Facts about the UK

• Sovereign state with four member states: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
• Capital city: London (also the capital of England and largest city in the UK)
• Capital of Wales is Cardiff, of Scotland is Edinburgh and of Northern Ireland is Belfast
• Constitutional monarchy with parliamentary system with bicameral legislature
• Queen Elizabeth II is head of state, a largely ceremonial role
• Head of government is the prime minister, currently David Cameron
• Developed country, and the world’s sixth biggest economy
• Was the world’s first industrialized country
• Member of European Union and Commonwealth of Nations, as well as the Council of Europe, the G7, the G8, the G20, NATO, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO)
• 14 Overseas Territories and 3 Crown Dependencies
• Official language: English (Welsh has resurged as a second language in Wales in recent years)
• National sports include: football (soccer), tennis, rugby union, rugby league, golf, cricket, rowing, boxing, motorsport and horse racing
• Traditional British cuisine includes the ‘full breakfast’, fish and chips, Sunday roast, shepherd’s pie, Cornish pasties, haggis, Yorkshire pudding, Arbroath Smokie and Welsh cakes.
• Currency: Pounds Sterling (£)
• International dialing code: +44
• Internet domain: .uk
• Time zone: Greenwich Mean Time (same as UTC); British Summer Time in summer (UTC+1)
• Cars drive on the left

Combining countryside and cosmopolitan cities, the UK has plenty to please both nature lovers and culture vultures. British filmmakers, actors, musicians, designers and writers are known and respected across the globe, and this is reflected in strong arts and cultural scenes across the country, with a huge range of galleries, museums and venues to match. At the ‘lower’ end of the culture spectrum, you can embrace the national passion for sport (especially football/soccer) or the classic British pastime of just going to the pub. 
Universities in the UK are also microcosms of entertainment in themselves, full of opportunities for getting involved in sports, theater, volunteering – and just having a good night out. Most major UK cities and universities are highly multicultural, providing opportunities to get to know not only British culture and people, but also to encounter people and traditions from around the world.

 

Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities

UNICEF launched a Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities in September 2007 to strengthen the profile of children at the national policy table. The study aims to influence the economic and social policies that affect resource allocations, and hopes to make children a priority in national programmes addressing the poverty of families raising children. The study addresses the health, education and protection needs of children living in poor, vulnerable households, unsafe circumstances and disadvantaged communities on the global study on child poverty and disparities blog.
Despite some progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, millions of women and children are still left behind – even in countries that have demonstrated improvement overall. UNICEF has taken on an enhanced organizational commitment to leveraging evidence, analysis, policy and partnerships to promote gender equality and deliver results for all children.  The Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities, carried out in 50 countries and seven regions with UNICEF support, is part of that effort.
The study produces comparable analyses on child poverty and disparities in nutrition, health, education and child and social protection through collaboration with national and international partners. The results and process of the study have generated evidence, insights and networks that have been used as leverage to influence national development plans, and inspired and fed into poverty reduction strategies or sector-wide approaches, common country assessments and other development instruments. With support from a number of experts and international research centres, the social policy and economical analysis unit in UNICEF's division of policy and planning created a comprehensive Global Study Guide to help carry out the study in each participating country.
The study finds context-specific evidence to assess policy responsiveness to outcomes related to child poverty and disparities. With a comprehensive approach, this analysis uses the material and deprivation approach to measure child poverty and assess how these approaches interact with one another.  The country analyses are conducted by teams of national experts in collaboration with UNICEF country focal points, and include participatory mechanisms to engage with multiple stakeholders at the country level.  A core, global network of child poverty experts across 50 countries should foster knowledge sharing and collaboration across every region. Individual country reports are at the heart of the global study, and we envision that they will serve as the building blocks for regional and global reports.

How to Get a UK Student Visa

Want to study in the UK? Find out whether you need to apply for a UK student visa, and how the application process works.
UK visa requirements and general immigration criteria are managed by the UK Border Agency (UKBA), which has an easy-to-navigate site to help you determine whether you need a UK student visa. While Swiss nationals and those from the EU/European Economic Area (EEA) states are treated as home students in the UK, all other international students are likely to need a visa to study in the UK.

Types of UK student visa

If you’re doing a short course or an 11-month English language course, and are over 18 years old, you may be eligible for the student visitor visa. This is valid up to 6 months for short courses and can be extended for a stay of up to 11 months for English language courses. If you’re doing a longer course, you’ll need to make sure your chosen institution is on the UKBA list of trusted sponsors. You can either apply for a Tier 4 (Child) student visa (if you’re aged 4-17) or a Tier 4 (General) student visa for those aged 18 and over.
You may also apply for entry to the UK as a prospective student. To do this you must prove you have been in touch with some UK universities. This visa will be valid for six months, during which time you may study – though it is advisable to upgrade to a full student visa sooner rather than later.

UK student visa requirements
Your course provider may be willing to help you to apply for a UK student visa once you have been offered a place on a course, so it’s always worth asking. You can apply for the visa up to three months in advance of the start date of your course. Make sure to allow plenty of time, as average visa processing times may vary.
UK student visas are awarded on a points-based system. In order to meet all the UK student visa requirements, you’ll need to provide: 

• Details of your passport
• A recent photograph
• A 'Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies’ (CAS) form from your course provider (worth 30 points)
• Proof of adequate English language skills, through one of the UKBA-approved English language tests (or perhaps through an alternate test or Skype interview with your course provider)
• Proof you have financial support throughout your stay in the UK (worth 10 points)

This proof of financial support can take the form of bank statements or a letter from your financial sponsor, showing you can cover your tuition fees, accommodation and living costs. You may be required to show you have a budget of at least £800-1,000 (US$1,320-1,650) per month.
You may also be required to produce documents showing your academic qualifications, and to attend an interview or biometric test, which includes a digital scan of your fingerprints. Depending on your country of origin, you may also be required to have certain medical vaccinations.
Using your UK student visa
When you enter the UK, a UK Border Agency officer will put a stamp on your passport that states the duration of your stay in the UK. You cannot extend your stay beyond this period. Before you arrive, you must make sure you are fully immunized, remembering to pack your immunization record in your hand luggage in case you are asked to show the Border Agency officer at your UK port of entry.
While UK student visitor visa holders and prospective student visa holders are not allowed to work in the UK, Tier 4 student visa holders can work a certain amount of hours per week in the holiday periods.
 

How to Make Love Last

I told her I loved her.
Your love is all about you, she replied;
it has nothing to do with me.
You love who you imagine me to be,
because no one can know who someone else really is.
I told her I would work to discover who she really was,
as much as possible, and love that person.
You can’t choose who you love, she replied;
your body chooses which bodies it loves,
and you’re just along for the ride.
Emotionally, any woman you perceive to be attractive,
energetic, fit, intelligent, creative,
thoughtful, independent, present — you’re going to love her.
I told her I would try to be more discerning,
more conscious of who I love, and love her more deliberately.
There are a thousand kinds of love, she replied;
you have them all conflated, mixed together
in one messy, undistinguished chemical blob.
Soon, the chemicals will stop flowing,
and all that will be left is your body wanting my body,
and then that will end and there will be nothing, only loss.
I told her I would study the works of Tom Robbins,
who said the only important question
is how to make love last.
Love is making you crazy, she replied;
you have important work to do, and these addictive feelings
are distracting you from it, making you foolish
and fearless and reckless and dangerous.
I told her it was the absence of love that makes me crazy;
When I’m not in love I’m disconnected, buried in my head,
and I don’t care enough about anything.
Then get a dog, she replied;
there are many kinds of love more grounded
and less exhausting than what you claim to feel for me.
I told her I loved her abundantly and unconditionally
and that I could also love other people, creatures,
places, music, ideas, activities. I had room for it all.
Then you don’t need me, she replied;
you are free.
Yes, I know, I told her. But I still love you.
Then there is no hope for you, she replied;
so go ahead and love me.
So I stopped telling her I loved her,
and showed her how I loved her instead.
One day she was talking with me, wandering along the beach,
telling me what she cared about,
what she was afraid of, what she loved doing,
what she craved and longed for and hoped for and mourned.
And I realized that, all along,
as she was telling me how she couldn’t love me,
she was showing me how much she did.

Save The World - The Opposite of Presence

And so I read about how to meditate: I read Kabat-Zinn, Osho, Krishnamurti. I listened to guided meditations, focused on my breath a hundred different ways. Tried to silence the noise in my head. Practiced, a little each day. Until all I could hear was the heartbeat of the universe. Until the edges of me faded, crumbled, and vanished. Until I felt the cells in my body dancing, telling me what I had always known, except that now there was no ‘me’.
I tried to face my fears. Not with teeth clenched, but with acceptance, honest acknowledgement. I opened myself to the possibility that each fear was meaningless, an invention, unreal. And I realized that the only real fear is the fear of one’s ego — that the fear of being trapped, of suffering, of failure, of loss, were all fears of what might happen to my ego, that no-longer-and-never me, in the future, how ‘it’ might feel ‘then’. When in fact there is only now, and that no-longer-and-never me is a mere concoction, devised with the intent to protect me but not protecting me at all, merely holding me back from being really me. And I knew: Lose that imaginary friend the ego, lose the fear.
I slept outdoors, in the forest, at the ocean’s edge, in all weather, listening to the wild sounds and watching the stars, trying to commune, to reconnect. I awoke to the sound of my own breathing and found that it was the sound of the surf, the wind, and the dragonfly.
I let myself fall in love, or almost fall in love. I thought this might make me realize the folly of all the thinking and anxieties inside my head, move past them, be free of them. As I loved more and more I felt everything I believed, everything that depended on conception, on thinking, fall away, until there was only feeling, invulnerable, overpowering feeling. Until love became the only truth.
I explored different forms of yoga, different ways to exercise my body, loosen it up, tone it, get connected with it. I found that as my body began to open, so did my mind, my heart, my consciousness. And then one day in tree pose I became a tree, anchored yet soaring into the sky, needing nothing but the sun and the rain that would always be. And then in child’s pose I became a child — the child I always was.
I sat in stillness listening to Deva Premal for hours — hari om tat sat, om shanti shanti shanti om — by lamplight, by candlelight, by the light of the sun and the stars and the moon, at sunrise, at sunset, with the sound of waves, with the sound of wind blowing through trees dampened by the rain. And the music became the stillness, and the light became the breath and the voice of the universe.
I explored tantric sex, holding off, holding back, staying just at the edge of bliss for hours until everything was bliss and time stopped. And my love and I became one body, boundaryless, one pulsing organism of pleasure and purpose, a supernova sending fire to the ends of all creation.
I fasted. I ate only foods I had picked myself that day. I drank water from a forest stream brought by my own hands to my lips. I drank a glass of wine with a bouquet so pure and exquisite that I would have been content all evening just to smell it. I ate honey, nut butter, peach nectar, that I had drizzled on the body of a beautiful woman, licked and sucked it in using only my lips and tongue. Until I could hear the scent, see the taste, feel the colour, all blended into one perfect sensation. Until I became that sensation.
I spent an entire day at the top of a hill inhabited only by wild creatures, just watching the forest and the sea below, paying attention, through a morning rainshower, an afternoon of intense heat, an evening thunderstorm, watched the sky glow infinite shades of yellow, blue, orange, red, grey and purple, a trillion colours that appear on no painter’s palette. And I melted into that downpour, that rainbow, becoming its ocean of air and water flowing into the sea and the sky.
I tried living without language for two weeks — no reading, writing, listening to or speaking words. Only music that was wordless or whose language was a mystery. No medium between me and what was real. Until even the words in my own head ceased. And I ceased to be a creature of language. And then ‘I’ ceased to be.
I surrounded myself with beautiful things, beautiful places, beautiful people, gazed endlessly and wondered at that beauty, breathed it in, memorized it, gasped at its impossibility. Until I began to see beauty in everything, even the lines on my hands and the sadness in my eyes.

•^•^•

“That’s all crap”, said Kali, leaning back against me as I rested against a tree, beside the horses drinking at the stream. She drew my arms around her, kissed my hand. “People just write that stuff about presence, like all those wishful thinking self-help books, because people want to believe it, not because it’s really true. Eckart Tolle, all those guys, they’re just fairy tale writers, posers, trying to make a living with their unique form of fiction.”
She sang to me for a while, some songs she made up in the moment, and then she wrote this, surrounded by lovely giant swirling question marks, and passed it up to me with a smile:

How great is the power of intention,
and how inescapable the prison we have made for ourselves?

How desperate do we have to be, and how enlightened,
before we just let go of everything
and let ourselves be free, be present,
be who we really are?

And how fearful do we have to be
to dare not try, to be so terrified
of the potential disappointment and despair if we failed,
if all our practice, all our diligent intention and letting go didn’t work,
that we just keep true joy and liberation and self-realization as dreams,
tucked safely away to keep us going
in the comfortable unreality we’ve built inside our heads,
this tomb of maybe-good-enough-for-now,
best-that-we-could-really-hope-for artificial life,
the opposite of presence?

How to Save the World - Three Ways of Being

As part of my research for my latest creative work, I reread my friend Indigo Ocean’s book Being Bliss. It’s a remarkably ambitious work that’s recently been reprinted, and Indigo is fearless in telling her own harrowing story to illustrate that the journey she recommends for us is possible for anyone. Here’s a brief synopsis of the book:

• The thesis of the book is that you can achieve self-realization through a combination of setting intention (being clear about your goals, day by day) and living in accordance with that intention (through a regular practice of paying attention and being alert to what is really happening, self-empowerment and discernment in what you choose to do and not do, and letting go, being open to and leaving space for the realization of that intention).
• Much of the book is focused on ways to free ourselves the self-limiting thoughts that keep us fearful, disconnected, and caught up in our egos and the stories in our heads. She stresses that the objective is not “self-improvement” but the realization of one’s true nature. She quotes Osho as saying “When you think about freedom, you think as if you will be there and free. You will not be there; there will be freedom. Freedom means freedom from the self, not freedom of the self.”
• The book includes several exercises (each to be repeated for three days) designed to give even the skeptic a sense of the possibility of achieving this freedom, and it introduces a broad spectrum of different meditation techniques that you can try until you find one that works best for you.
• She describes her own ‘Ascension’ yoga practice. It starts with aerobic activity of your own choosing, and then a choice of your own asanas (yoga poses) with shavasana (lying on your back in a relaxed, deep breathing position) before the first and in between each few poses. The shavasana breaks should be contemplative, appreciative and as full of positive energy as you can manage. The final poses should be balancing poses, and the concluding shavasana should be one of total relaxation and gratefulness, and for the setting of positive intentions as you end the practice.
• She also summarizes a form of ecstatic dance consistent with this practice that might work better for those who struggle with meditation, and the form might be of interest to DJs who put together ecstatic dance sets. She recommends that if you dance alone that you do so free of disturbances and as much as possible with eyes closed. The music set she recommends is the following sequence of song types (~5 minutes each): (1) simple rhythm (connection to 1st chakra), (2) funky rhythm (2nd chakra), (3) hard driving (3rd chakra), (4) a beloved melody (4th chakra), (5) moving/inspiring (6th chakra). [My first playlist using this sequence worked quite well; it was (1) Pumped Up Kicks (Foster the People), (2) Young Black Pearl (Shydeeh), (3) Doly (Quatre Etoiles), (4) Om Namo Bhagavate (Deva Premal -- the non-chanted version), (5) Shine (Joni Mitchell), followed by a suite of Empire of the Sun, T-Vice and Cinematic Orchestra songs.]
• The book concludes with some practices for grounding when you’re trying to cope with negative emotions, and some counsel on relationships, specifically about how helping each other heal is a sacred responsibility for us all in this broken modern culture.

In writing the book, Indigo tacitly keeps coming back at each subject from three different perspectives, to appeal to readers with fundamentally different worldviews about how to make ourselves, and the world, more ‘blissful’. I would call them the Rational, the Spiritual, and the Natural ‘ways of being’. The table at the top of this post describes what I think are the key elements of these worldviews. I think it could be very useful to think about, for those of us who often find ourselves working at cross-purposes with people who share our political and philosophical sensibilities but see the world through these different lenses. Many of us may straddle or vacillate between them, and many books have been written trying to ‘reconcile’ rational and spiritual worldviews, but perhaps it’s more important that we just appreciate the differences and how and why they have arisen, and accept them.
Indigo takes great pains in her book to use the ‘language’ of all three worldviews, so she doesn’t alienate readers regardless of where they are coming from. We would be wise to do likewise, I think.