Honours Graduates Research Articles

Editorial introductions.

Editorial introductions.

Editorial introductions.

Editorial introductions.

Editorial introductions.

Editorial introductions.

Exploring educational advantage in the UK via graduate employment of joint honours degrees by examining pre-university tariff and degree classification

PurposeIn the UK, the majority of university students specialise and study just one subject at bachelor degree level, commonly known in the UK as a single honours degree. However, nearly all British universities will permit students if they wish to study two or even three subjects, so-called joint or combined honours degrees, internationally known as a double major. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between graduate employment, pre-university educational attainment and degree classification achieved. The study also explored student choice with respect to university prestige.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analysed the complete data set provided from the Higher Education Statistics Agency Destination of Leavers from the Higher Education survey, and combined this with data from the POLAR4 quintiles, Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) tariff points and degree classification. The data were analysed to establish whether there was a difference in the choices and highly skilled graduate employment of the joint honours students, focussing particularly on Russell Group and Post-92 Universities, in order to build on previous published work.FindingsFor any UCAS tariff band, the higher the POLAR4 quintile the higher the rate of highly skilled destination. Russell Group outperform the Post-92 graduates in their rates of highly skilled destinations, for any tariff band and for both joint and single honours degrees. Higher POLAR4 quintile graduates are more likely to study at the Russell Group, with this effect increasing the higher the UCAS tariff. With the exception of first class honours graduates from Post-92 universities, joint and single honours from the Russell Group have a higher rate of highly skilled destination than Post-92 in the next higher degree classification.Social implicationsLow POLAR4 quintile students with high UCAS tariffs are “under-matching” and there is an impact on their graduate employment as a result.Originality/valueThis study adds new insights into joint honours degrees and also reinforces the literature around educational advantage and achievement prior to university, and the impact on graduate employment. Educational disadvantage persists over the course of a university degree education, from the perspective of gaining graduate employment. Higher quintile graduates are proportionately more likely to achieve the highest degree classifications, and proportionately less likely to achieve the lowest classifications, than graduates from the lower quintiles. Joint honours graduates are less likely to achieve a first class honours degree than single honours, and this will affect their rate of highly skilled destination.

Career opportunities of Honor Graduates and Student Leaders: The case of STO Domingo District

Career opportunities of Honor Graduates and Student Leaders: The case of STO Domingo District

Announcements

Announcements

Dr James Riley, pioneer in histamine and mast cell studies.

Dr James Riley, an honours graduate of Edinburgh University, had to give up a surgical career because of an affliction of his hands, and instead became a radiotherapist in Dundee. He had always been fascinated by past heroes of medical research, and set out to carve his own niche in the study of mast cells. In the early 1950s, no one knew what their function was other than the mast cell granules being the storehouses of heparin. Riley and pharmacologist Dr Geoffrey West went on to galvanise this area of study by showing in a notable series of experiments that the mast cell granules are also the main repository of histamine, a key participant in allergic and anaphylactic reactions. Riley's story is a prime example of the ability to make cutting-edge discoveries even in the face of modest facilities.

Educational advantage and employability of UK university graduates

Purpose In the UK, the majority of university students specialise and study just one subject at bachelor degree level, commonly known in the UK as a single honours degree. However, nearly all British universities will permit students if they wish to study two or even three subjects, so-called joint or combined honours degrees, internationally known as a double major. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether educational advantage, measured by the “Participation of Local Areas” (POLAR) classification, correlated with rates of graduate destinations for joint and single honours graduates. This study focused particularly on Russell Group and Post-92 Universities. Design/methodology/approach The authors analysed the complete data set provided from the Higher Education Statistics Agency Destination of Leavers from the Higher Education survey, and combined this with data from the POLAR4 quintiles, which aggregate geographical regions across the UK based on the proportion of its young people that participate in higher education. The data were analysed to establish whether there was a difference in the highly skilled graduate employability of the joint honours students, focusing particularly on Russell Group and Post-92 Universities, in order to build on previous published work. Findings Single honours and joint honours graduates from higher participation POLAR4 quintiles were more likely to be in a highly skilled destination. However at both the Russell Group and the Post-92 universities, respectively, there was no trend towards a smaller highly skilled destinations gap between the honours types for the higher quintiles. For the highest POLAR4 quintile, the proportion of joint honours graduates was substantially higher at the Russell Group than at Post-92 universities. Furthermore, in any quintile, there were proportionately more joint honours graduates from the Russell Group, compared with single honours graduates, and increasingly so the higher the quintile. Research limitations/implications This study focused on joint honours degrees in the UK where the two or three principal subjects fall into different Joint Academic Coding System (JACS) subject areas, i.e. the two or three subjects are necessarily diverse rather than academically cognate. This excluded the class of joint honours degrees where the principal subjects lie within the same JACS subject area, i.e. they may be closer academically, although still taught by different academic teams. However, the overall proportion of joint honours graduates identified using the classification was in line with the UCAS (2017) data on national rates of combined studies acceptances. Practical implications All Russell Group graduates, irrespective of their POLAR4 quintile, were far more likely to be in a highly skilled destination than single or joint honours graduates of Post-92 universities. Even the lowest quintile graduates of the Russell Group had greater rates of highly skilled destination than the highest quintile from Post-92 universities, for both single and joint honours graduates. This demonstrated the positive impact that graduating from the Russell Group confers on both single and joint honours graduates. Social implications This study could not explain the much smaller gap in the highly skilled destinations between single honours and joint honours graduates found in the Russell Group, compared with the Post-92. Why do a higher proportion of joint honours graduates hail form the upper POLAR4 quintiles, the Russell Group joint honours graduates were more disproportionately from the upper POLAR4 quintiles and the joint honours upper POLAR4 quintiles represented such a larger proportion of the Russell Group overall undergraduate population? Other student characteristics such as tariff on entry, subjects studied, gender, age and ethnicity might all contribute to this finding. Originality/value This study demonstrated that, averaged across all universities in the UK, there was a trend for both single honours and joint honours graduates from higher participation POLAR4 quintiles to be more likely to be in a highly skilled destination, i.e. the more educationally advantaged, were more likely to be in a highly skilled destination, as a proportion of the total from each honours type. This accorded with HESA (2018b) data, but expanded those findings to include direct consideration of joint honours graduates.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Employability outcomes for university joint honours graduates

PurposeIn the UK, the vast majority of university students specialise and study just one subject at bachelor degree level, commonly known in the UK as a single honours degree. However, nearly all British universities will permit students if they wish to study two or even three subjects, so-called joint or combined honours degrees, internationally known as a double major. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the study of a joint rather than a single honours degree had an impact on employment outcomes six months after graduation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analysed the complete data set provided from the Higher Education Statistics Agency Destination of Leavers from the Higher Education survey. The data were analysed to establish whether there was a difference in the highly skilled graduate employability of the joint honours students. The authors established whether there were any differences inherent in completing a joint honours degree in a post-1992 higher education institution, by nation within the UK or within a Russell Group higher education institution.FindingsThe authors found an approximately consistent 3 per cent point negative gap nationally in the highly skilled employment rates of joint compared with single honours graduates. This gap was at its lowest in the highly selective Russell Group universities (−1.52 per cent points) and highest in post-1992, vocationally oriented universities (−7.13 per cent points) and in Northern Ireland universities (−12.45 per cent points). Joint honours graduates of Scottish universities fared well, with a +3.09 per cent point advantage over the national average for joint honours. The authors found that universities that had a higher proportion of joint honours graduates generally had a lower employability gap between their joint and single honours graduates.Research limitations/implicationsThis study focussed on joint honours degrees in the UK where the two or three principal subjects fall into different JACS subject areas, i.e. the two or three subjects are necessarily diverse rather than academically cognate. Future work will consider the class of joint honours degrees where the principal subjects lie within the same JACS subject area, i.e. they may be closer academically, although still taught by different academic teams. This grouping will include, for example, pairs of foreign languages, some social sciences pairings such as politics and sociology, and pairings such as history and theology from the historical and philosophical subject area.Originality/valueThe potential disbenefits of studying for a joint honours degree are apparent in this study. Joint honours students may face organisational, academic and cultural challenges that require a positive, conscious and sustained effort to overcome, on both the part of the student and the higher education institution. In particular for graduates of the post-1992 universities, it appears that there is a negative relative impact on highly skilled employment. This impact is lessened if the university is Scottish (four-year degrees with in-built breadth of study) or where the proportion completing joint honours degrees is relatively high.

Do non-academic professionals enhance universities’ performance? Reputation vs. organisation

ABSTRACTUniversities are increasingly engaging with non-academic professionals in facilitating performance outcomes, reaffirming themselves as purposive organisations, i.e. institutions with the ability to organise strategically in the pursuit of goals and standards. However, there is little empirical evidence for the impact of professional staff on university performance. Drawing on a sample of 100 British universities, the author assesses whether the changes in the ratio of professional staff to students (from 2003 to 2011) influence subsequent university performance. The author finds that universities that are moderately increasing their share of professional staff display higher levels of degree completion, but no significant differences can be observed in terms of research quality, good honours degrees and graduate employability. University performance is largely determined by reputation, prestigious universities performing higher in all dimensions. The findings contribute to the emerging empirical research assessing the impact of professional staff in higher education.

A Narrative Web-Based Study of Reasons To Go On Living after a Suicide Attempt: Positive Impacts of the Mental Health System

Background and Objective Suicide attempts are 10-20X more common than completed suicide and an important risk factor for death by suicide, yet most people who attempt suicide do not die by suicide. The process of recovering after a suicide attempt has not been well studied. The Reasons to go on Living (RTGOL) Project, a narrative web-based study, focuses on experiences of people who have attempted suicide and made the decision to go on living, a process not well studied. Narrative research is ideally suited to understanding personal experiences critical to recovery following a suicide attempt, including the transition to a state of hopefulness. Voices from people with lived experience can help us plan and conceptualize this work. This paper reports on a secondary research question of the larger study: what stories do participants tell of the positive role/impact of the mental health system. Material and Methods A website created for The RTGOL Project ( www.thereasons.ca ) enabled participants to anonymously submit a story about their suicide attempt and recovery, a process which enabled participation from a large and diverse group of participants. The only direction given was “if you have made a suicide attempt or seriously considered suicide and now want to go on living, we want to hear from you.” The unstructured narrative format allowed participants to describe their experiences in their own words, to include and emphasize what they considered important. Over 5 years, data analysis occurred in several phases over the course of the study, resulting in the identification of data that were inputted into an Excel file. This analysis used stories where participants described positive involvement with the mental health system (50 stories). Results Several participants reflected on experiences many years previous, providing the privilege of learning how their life unfolded, what made a difference. Over a five-year period, 50 of 226 stories identified positive experiences with mental health care with sufficient details to allow analysis, and are the focus of this paper. There were a range of suicidal behaviours in these 50 stories, from suicidal ideation only to medically severe suicide attempts. Most described one or more suicide attempts. Three themes identified included: 1) trust and relationship with a health care professional, 2) the role of friends and family and friends, and 3) a wide range of services. Conclusion Stories open a window into the experiences of the period after a suicide attempt. This study allowed for an understanding of how mental health professionals might help individuals who have attempted suicide write a different story, a life-affirming story. The stories that participants shared offer some understanding of “how” to provide support at a most-needed critical juncture for people as they interact with health care providers, including immediately after a suicide attempt. Results of this study reinforce that just one caring professional can make a tremendous difference to a person who has survived a suicide attempt.

Interview in Melbourne with Meg Labrum, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra, June 16, 2015

FIGURE 1. Meg Labrum, General Manager, Collection, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. > victoria duckett:Thanks for agreeing to talk to me, Meg. I really appreciate it, especially to have someone from Australia in our collection of voices in the archive. I thought I'd start by asking you about your professional background. When did you start working in the archive? What did you start doing? > meg labrum:I often say I began as a “child” archivist. It was a combination [of factors]: I was an honors graduate, and I had a librarian graduate diploma when I joined the National Library [of Australia] in 1980. So, I went into the system and began in what was then called the National Film Lending Collection as the reference librarian. The Lending Collection was the direct sibling of the then National Film Archive, which lived in the National Library. > vd:And this was in Canberra? > ml:Yes. It was in the days when there were (I think) about seven of us in the whole archive. We have gone up to, on occasion, to round about 230 people. Back then we were very, very tiny. My first job in the National Film Archive was as what was called the documentation officer, the person who was responsible for the collection of all the nonfilm aspects of production—scripts, stills, posters, costumes, private papers, and anything else you can imagine. It was a blissful job. It was something that was, in some sense, quite unformed in those days. > > I discovered that even then we had a mountain of posters that lived on top of big map cabinets in the film section, which had come in from a couple of distributors over the years. It was a combination of Australian and international posters. We had a …

From STEM to STEAM: Reframing What it Means to Learn

Although involvement in art and design have been shown to play an essential role in catalyzing STEM research, true integration is still an area of active research. The realization of STEM education via STEAM lends itself to interactive and participatory dialogic art; this juncture provides a nonjudgmental space to cultivate the question-making aspect of inquiry, the ability to comfortably hold uncertainty, and a sensitivity to the process of discovery. Even though STEM education can (and often is) inquiry-based, assessments still tend to focus on whether knowledge or skills have been obtained, and this is no different than the current general practice in the arts. Consequently, what does it mean to learn in a STEAM context? This article presents a multifaceted view which can be used to organize meaningful assessments for STEAM learning. Author/Artist Bio Dr. Nicole Radziwill is (as of Fall 2015) an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University. She is an ASQ Certified Six Sigma Black Belt whose research focuses on quality management and informatics. Dr. Morgan C. Benton is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University. He teaches programming and web development, and his research emphasizes ways to motivate and inspire students in higher education. Cassidy Moellers is a 2015 honors graduate of the ISAT and Media Arts and Design (SMAD) program at JMU.

‘The chearful haunts’: John Armstrong (1709–1779), physician, poet, satirist and leveller of medical knowledge

John Armstrong, the first honours graduate of the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine, was famous in his day for a lengthy didactic poem entitled The Art of Preserving Health (1744). He is now obscure except to scholars specializing in the 18th century and, when discussed at all, often dismissed as a failed physician who wrote mediocre poetry in a quest for money and fame. A new exegesis by Adam Budd exhumes Armstrong as an original voice who offered timely and reassuring advice to Britons as they braced for another epidemic of plague; who depicted illness through the lens of a vulnerable and sympathetic physician, and who was perhaps above all else a leveller of medical knowledge. Elaborating on Budd's thesis, it would seem that Armstrong, a complicated man, has frequently been misread and was in some ways ahead of his time.

Memory, the Nakba, and Lieux de Memoire

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVIII, No.1, Fall 2014 Memory, the Nakba, and Lieux de Memoire Samantha A. Borders* When considering the elements that make up a cultural identity, a keen sense of the personal is vital. In looking back at the events that have tied a people together, memory plays an essential role in preserving a history. In the case of the Palestinian Nakba, or the “catastrophe”, that consisted of the ethnic cleansing of some 800,000 Arabs from the region of British Mandate Palestine, its commemoration acts as more than a point of reference for these people. Whether in diaspora or on the land itself, the corporate suffering caused by this instance has become a pivot in modern Palestinian identity. This essay seeks to demonstrate the viability of the Nakba as a Lieu de Memoire (site of memory) as outlined by Pierre Nora through its maintenance via storytelling. The works of Ahmad Sa’adi will be foundational in this study, and stand as points of reference. By exploring the connections between memory, storytelling, and ultimately identity, it will be illustrated that remembrance itself is an indispensable tool for a dispossessed and scattered people to remain united under a single unit of affiliation. To understand the connection between the Nakba and its commemoration , a definition of sites of memory is required. Primarily, “the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of thing, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial”1 , and to act as a point of cultural reference to a time past. Sites of memory differ from history in the sense that this act as “a bond tying us to the eternal present” while the latter “is a representation 71 *Samantha Borders is an honors graduate program at the University of Exeter in the UK, Borders focuses her research on Palestinian Christian identity and construction of knowledge , and is a contributing writer to various media outlets such as e-IR, Comment Middle East, and Future Voices of America. Currently, she is resuming her studies at the PhD level at the University of Exeter. 1 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 19. of the past”2 and is by nature more sterile. Also unlike history, these tend to be rooted in nationalism and can be based on myths surrounding the aura of a particular nation. A lieu can represent a fictitious or actual past, depending on its ability to harness the imaginations of a people and unite them under a single identity. However, the validity of the memory is normally not called into question. Rather, its potency and ability to evoke emotion are deemed of far greater importance. To fall under Nora’s sense of the phrase, the site itself must be a place of universal connection for a people. In this sense, the Nakba is an ideal lieu, since all Palestinians were affected by the Nakba in some way, and share in the corporate sense of dispossession and homelessness. Because of this universal experience, “its timeless, multifaceted, and complex nature”3 are ideally suited for creating a site of memory for Palestinians, regardless of their location. The potency of this recollection, recalling the loss of the familiar and placement into the unknown, stands as a uniting front for Palestinians worldwide. Therefore, while the on-going Judaisation of Palestine transforms the conditions on the ground, the Nakba remains as a defining moment beyond the reach of alteration. Although it may seem to be a natural tendency to look to history when bolstering a sense of identity, this is not necessarily the case. Whereas history and physical objects can be universal points of cultural reference, memory is far more intimately tied to the people themselves. It has the ability act as a bonding agent between people on a level that history will never touch, due to its specificity and requirement of participation in one form or another. For many Palestinians, the Nakba represents one of the major sites of memory for the modern Palestinian people, whether residing within the confines of historic...

DEDICATION OF THE JOHN MOORE MEMORIAL VOLUME: SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNAL OF GEOLOGY

John Michael Moore was a B.Sc. and Honours graduate in Geology at the University of Cape Town, and Cape Town born and bred, and a baby-boomer sensu strictu , being born in September 1946. By 1972 John was employed as an exploration geologist, developing and fulfilling his lifelong love for exploration in its true sense of discovery and revelling in the intellectual and physical rigours of the discipline. He worked on a variety of commodities both in South Africa and in the U.S. during his formative years, but was ultimately drawn back into academia first to undertake his Ph.D. (again at the University of Cape Town) and ultimately to the opportunity to indulge both his love of exploration and the urge to share and disseminate this enthusiasm through teaching, through the Exploration Geology M.Sc. programme hosted at Rhodes University from 1990 until his premature death in 2012. The genesis and alteration characteristics of precious and base metal deposits in the Northern Cape and Namibia always had a special place in John’s heart (and head), although his research included diverse elements including the stratigraphy, geochemistry and ore genesis …

When should proton radiation therapy be used to treat brain tumors?

Jay S Loeffler, MD, FACR, FASTRO, is an honors graduate of both Williams College (MA, USA) and Brown University School of Medicine (RI, USA). Loeffler completed his radiation oncology training at the Harvard Joint Center for Radiation Therapy, where he served as Chief Resident in 1985–1986, after completing a year of postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard School of Public Health Radiobiology Laboratory with Jack Little. Since 1986 he has served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School (MA, USA), initially at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (MA, USA) and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (MA, USA). He also served as Director of the Brain Tumor Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital from 1988 to 1996. He was recruited to the Massachusetts General Hospital (MA, USA) in 1996 as Director of the Northeast Proton Therapy Center. He served as the Andreas Soriano Professor and is currently the Herman and Joan Suit Professor of Radiation Oncology, Harvard Medical School and Chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology since 2000. Loeffler is an authority on the treatment of benign and malignant brain tumors. He is an author of over 210 peer-reviewed publications, 180 book chapters and review articles, and co-editor of nine textbooks in the fields of radiation oncology and neuro-oncology. He has served as the principal investigator on a large program project grant from the National Cancer Institute concerning proton therapy. He has served on numerous journal editorial boards in the field of oncology. Loeffler is a Fellow of the American College of Radiology and the American Society of Radiation Oncology and is a Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Perceptions of High School Honor Students on the Academic Skills Needed to Succeed in College Science Classes

High school honor graduates at a rural high school in the Southeastern United States of America have not been as prepared for science classes at the college level as their teachers expected. At the study site, which is located in one rural high school, honor graduates have been struggling with their freshman college science classes although these students were honors students in their high school science classes. The purpose of this study was to understand how well prepared high school honor graduates felt upon entering college. This qualitative case study was grounded in the brain-based theory of Caine and Caine with regard to honor high school students entering college. The research question focused what teachers and administrators can do to more effectively prepare honor students for college science classes. Twenty high school honor students participated in semi-structured face-to-face interviews, and a predominant theme was identified through coding of the interview transcripts by case and research question. The findings revealed what skill sets were most important for success in college.

What are the Perceptions of High School Honor Graduates Regarding Their Preparedness for College Freshman Science Classes?

What are the Perceptions of High School Honor Graduates Regarding Their Preparedness for College Freshman Science Classes?