In my first year of studying BA (Hons) International Tourism and Hospitality Management, the units I studied included Tourism and Hospitality Industries, Financial Reporting, Tourism Wildlife and the Environment, Marketing, Food Systems, and Global Hospitality. Over the entire year, I was on campus for an average of 4 days per week. During peak assignment times throughout the year, my lecturers often held extra drop-in seminars and were available by email and Microsoft Teams to help with any queries for assignment content and/or structure.

Regarding attendance during the first year, it did vary in different lectures. Naturally, the financial reporting lectures seemed much smaller than the wildlife lectures; many people struggled with the financial reporting unit during the first year and so I’m led to believe that many stopped showing up (cue the whole ‘it’s only first year so it doesn’t matter as much’ – DO NOT FALL INTO THIS TRAP!).

While financial reporting was difficult at times – if you still try to show up to your lectures, sometimes the understanding can just click one day (it did for me!) and if the information doesn’t click for you – then at least your lecturers will feel much more inclined to help you out if they can see that you’re trying.

As well as this, nearing the end of the second year one piece of advice I would suggest to everyone studying at university is do not think of your course as ‘year one’, ‘year two’, and so on. The information that you learn during lectures of your first year will be relevant and required for the understanding of lectures during years two, three, and four. One of my units for the second year is revenue management – which has been made a lot easier now I have the knowledge of how assets and liabilities work from financial reporting in the first year.

During some periods throughout the year, I had no assignments due and had more free time on my hands. I attended multiple Business School Employability Programme lectures and workshops with various spokespeople and alumni which turned out to be quite useful. These types of talks run frequently throughout the year, and they usually give information on topics such as writing CV’s, advice on placement searching, advice for graduate roles when you’ve finished your degree, how to set up a LinkedIn profile, as well as various other talks.

Some of these alumni workshops were catered specifically toward International Tourism and Hospitality undergraduates – with some panel members being students studying my course in higher years – this was especially helpful when I started thinking about my placement. One of the panellists I met at one of the talks has been super helpful for advice on a tourism placement; she explained the process of her placement to me and how she completed a split placement for her industrial experience; half of which was working for BU and the other half she was working in Spain (she absolutely adored her placement year). I have since connected with her on LinkedIn and she’s been a great help in my placement search – I will also be doing a split placement commencing in July – in Australia! I recommend any Tourism student to attend the extra talks (they should pop up on your emails) as the connections you can make can really help push you and help you with your studies and placement help!

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Tourism & Hospitality degrees