By Lê Bảo Hiền. For international students, cultural festivals can be the hardest moments to be away from home. A Vietnamese student describes her first New Year in the UK. I'm 16. I've been in England for five months, and I've just experienced my first Tet holiday (the Lunar New Year in Vietnam) away from home. In this foreign country, there wasn't much to remind me of Tet. Here, no one knows what Tet is, or if they did recognise the date, they just know it as "Chinese New Year". And, unlike previous years, I still had to go to college on Tet this year. More...

By Annika Small. Solving social problems rather than getting rich is the priority for tomorrow's ambitious entrepreneurs. Technology has levelled the playing field, opening up remarkable opportunities for young people. According to a Populus survey, more than a quarter of 16- to 25-year-olds want to set up their own business, and 14% are in the process of doing so, compared with 8% only a year ago. More...

By Alison Flood. University of Central Lancashire will coach students to make the most of their manuscripts. The University of Central Lancashire has announced the launch of what it describes as the world's first degree in self-publishing. The MA will begin in September, and course leader Debbie Williams believes it will help "legitimise" self-publishing. "Things have definitely changed. In the last two years, self-publishing has stopped being a dirty word, and is a legitimate option for authors," she said. "Even the biggest authors are looking at it now." More...

By Sanum Jain. The increasing risks of the conventional job market mean there's even more reason for graduates to take their own risks, argues. By this time last year, some of my peers at the University of Manchester had secured jobs at reputable corporations while others had launched their first business or started making travel plans. I was somewhere in the middle, like many students in third year – stuck in a limbo of tedious application forms and not knowing what would become of me after graduation. More...

By Mel Rohse and Dean D'Souza. From setting up job alerts and meeting with academics to tutoring schoolchildren, Mel and Dean say it's not for lack of trying that they haven't secured an academic job. Securing employment is becoming increasingly difficult. But there are at least two routes to a postdoctoral research career. The first is to develop a research proposal and then seek funding for it. The advantage of this option is that you can seek answers to questions that you thought about during your PhD training but never had the time to pursue. More...

By Steve Joy. Here's the truth: interviews may be terrifying, but they are also predictable. Steve Joy shares his top tips. Many dread going to job interviews. Yet it is a fact not often acknowledged that interviews are pretty predictable. You can prepare for them without feeling as if you are submitting to a dark ritual in the face of which passive acceptance is the only option. More...

By Anonymous academic. Evangelical students cannot tolerate diversity of opinion and resist secular critiques of their views. My job is no longer the joy it once was. I'm a senior academic in a religion department at a Russell Group university. Before you ask, no, we're not training would-be vicars. And no, we're not in the business of promoting particular faiths. More...

By Helen Whitehouse. Not all students are ready for university. A student blogger shares her experience of dropping out, and starting uni afresh. In September last year I started university, expecting to be a student for another three years. But, come mid November, I did something out of character – I dropped out. More...

By Natasha Slee. After a BA in film, Freya Jewitt changed direction with her MA, following her love of museums and galleries. Before Freya Jewitt applied to study an MA in art gallery and museum studies at the University of Leeds, she emailed everyone she knew who worked in galleries and asked: "is it worth it?"
"I got a 50/50 response," Jewitt says. "An MA is good, but equally you could spend a year getting experience, they said." More...

By Claire Shaw. Sponsored Q&A: Join our live chat 7 February on how to cut costs without damaging the university experience. As the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announces reductions to spending in 2014-15, universities are looking for new and innovative ways to save money. For many, this has meant outsourcing campus services, including catering and facilities management. More...