Three Blog Reviews
Blog One: http://eldelcheva.coventry.domains/
This blog is written by Elena Delcheva who went on a work placement in the UK. She has an interest in photography and completed her work placement with a PR (Personal Relations) company. Her blog has a vibrant yet professional feel to it. Each section is clearly headed and user friendly. Throughout each of the sections which follows her work throughout the year, she has identified not only what she did, but also the challenges she faced, intertwined with the new skills learnt from there. This is seen especially in the section titled 'Improving my Transferable Skills'. Looking through her blog, I feel as though she had a good chance to home in on improving and exploring specific skills such as communication and writing. It was interesting to read how she explored and improved these throughout the year. I also looked at these skills, but in a completely different light. As I improved my cross-culture communication, she was more focused towards professional communication so reviewing her blog has enabled me to see another side of development.
Emily's blog is set out a lot more like my own, as she used the same platform as me to document her experiences. I found this a lot easier to navigate. From looking through her blog, it is interesting to see how she had a very practically based approach to her placement. She also did work outside of her placement for fun, which built on the skills she was learning on the placement. This links to my work, in the sense that I worked on learning Italian while in the country, using the skills I learnt from my Italian courses, so I could better speak to the people around me. As Emily is on a media-related placement, her experiences mirror my own in many places. She writes a lot about the importance of networking throughout her year and making the most of opportunities (which is evident through her work). Looking through all of it in detail opened my eyes to how we made similar choices to gain similar skills, but in very different environments.
Blog Three: https://ballt7.wixsite.com/website?fbclid=IwAR3j3y1NUuAUOiVRGOa7baOMZizr_M__x1UipD24lyFnc0hHLkdL7xekId0
Tenecia Ball's blog is also an Erasmus Study abroad blog. She went to Stuttgart Germany and from looking through her blog I found out she took a Journalism course at her German University. As my degree is Journalism, it was interesting to see how she documented that experience and learned about the forms of communication and also how content was formed and published. One of the similarities I noted between her experiences and my own was that the courses she took didn't always match up to what they had said they were. I found this through my experiences in Cattolica and it seems as though Tenecia did too; this makes me start to think it may be a common trend in Europe due to cultural differences. Though we were in completely separate countries and universities, a lot of our experiences can be seen as almost the same in many areas. On her 'Auf Wiedersehen' post, she talks about how sad it was when a lot of her friends left due to them being there for one semester and her for the whole year. How she writes and describes how she felt, is exactly how I felt. Reading this post has helped me to better understand my experience through her experience.