The UC curriculum is carefully designed to promote student learning outcomes related to university and career readiness, and is delivered via a three-year sequence of workshops, activities and consultations. The curriculum is aligned with three key themes, and comprises three levels of support.
Three Themes
Knowledge – building awareness and understanding of career options, higher education pathways and individual universities to ensure students can make fully informed decisions about their futures
Skills – empowering students by developing a range of attributes such as self-awareness, independence, ownership, decision-making, and effective written and verbal communication
Mindset – promoting the belief that students have the ability to positively impact their future through active engagement, short and long-term planning, and a combination of aspirational, balanced and realistic thinking.
Three Levels of Support
Personal Guidance
- Advice on subject combination choices for rising IBDP students
- Personal statement review and feedback sessions
- Mock interviews
Group / Interest-based
- University talks and taster lectures
- Workshop for prospective medicine, dentistry and veterinary applicants
- Overview of the US college admissions process
Cohort and Schoolwide
- SISHK’s annual Higher Education Fair
- Alumni sharing sessions
- Comparison of university systems around the world
- CV/resume workshop
Beginning this sequence in Secondary 4 helps to ensure that students can make informed decisions about their IBDP subject combinations with long-term goals in mind, while establishing a foundation for students to take full ownership over their personal university search and application process during DP1 and DP2, under the guidance of the UC Team.
Example of a Secondary 4 student workshop:
University Fit Exploration
Living and learning environments can vary dramatically from one university to another, even within the same country or city, and every student has their own individual preferences and priorities for their future study. The relative importance of factors such as academic flexibility, expectations for social and community involvement, or access to urban resources are different for each student. The UC Team will guide S4 students through an interactive exploration of their emerging preferences for higher education across a range of academic, social and geographical factors, along with a discussion of how these preferences may impact their search process.
Example of a DP1 student workshop:
PREPARING A CV/RESUME FOR INTERNSHIPS AND UNIVERSITY APPLICATIONS
The UC Team’s CV and resume writing workshop is designed to help students prepare for the school’s Internship Programme. We will offer strategies for choosing which accomplishments to feature and how students can make their top attributes stand out. We will also highlight some common mistakes students often make when preparing these documents and how these can be avoided.
All DP1 students will need to submit a CV or resume in early spring in order to confirm their internship placement. The resume will be further refined towards their preparation of the university applications after the summer of 2020.
Example of a DP2 student workshop:
ELEVATOR PITCHES
Elevator pitches are short self-summaries designed to make a positive first impression. These are useful for students when they introduce themselves to university representatives and often as an answer to the most common first question of an admissions interview: “Tell me about yourself.” Students will have an opportunity to draft their elevator pitches, practice them and get feedback from peers, mentors and the university counsellors.
SISHK Higher Education Fair
This annual event brings together representatives from a large number of universities on a single afternoon each September, allowing SISHK students to efficiently learn about the variety of higher education opportunities available around the world. The chance to interact one-on-one with university staff and alumni assures that students can obtain answers to the questions that matter most to them, while also promoting conversational and networking skills.
Our 2019 fair featured 80 schools from 13 countries. During the past two years, we have restructured this event into a combination of collaborative online fairs and smaller in-person sessions to ensure that students retain direct access to representatives from university representatives around the world.
Full range of university-related resources and support
In addition to the events featured above, the UC Team also offers the following resources and services to the school community:
- Parent seminars and forums
- Mock interviews
- Psychometric self-evaluation and reflection
- Individual university talks and visits
- Career-specific sessions
- Comprehensive application support and guidance for DP students
- Continued support and guidance for alumni