With so much going on at work, the team took some well-earned time out at our local Glee club on the 22^nd for an evening of entertainment hosted by the lovable and hysterical Martin Mor.  With our Rebekah providing fuel for the comedy routine, we all had a cracking night.  It’s not the first time in the spotlight this month for our lovely Miss Nottingham contestant: Rebekah’s been adorning the pages of ASOS, modelling for trendy clothing company Organic Pirate, too.

Back in the office, quality and 5* customer service have been the buzz words of the moment. We’re focusing all of our efforts on ensuring that the quality of essays and dissertations going through our doors is exceptional.  This means everything from coaching our researchers to constantly revising our stringent quality checks to ensure we don’t miss a thing.  The level of positive customer feedback has gone through the roof and this is really helping us refine our service so please keep sending it in for every piece of work you get, as it helps us no end.

You’ll also hear some new voices in the office over the next few weeks – our newest team member Simon has fit in well to our friendly Customer crew, veteran original team member Liv has returned for our busy spot and Joe, Sharon, Julia, Sean, Sarah and Laurent will all be spending some time helping out to keep things running smoothly.  So please make them feel welcome and be assured that everyone at UK Essays will be working extra hard to ensure we deliver an exceptional service to you through our busiest time.

Spotlight on: The Customer team

Our main aim is to help you get the grade you need, so all the changes we’ve made will help you find what you’re looking for and get answers fast!

What have we changed?

We’ve made our order form a lot easier to use and added tool-tips on each section that give you advice on the exact information that you need to supply to us. The more accurate the information that you supply, the quicker your order is processed.

To help you with your studies even more, we’ve added more services to the order form and made services easier to find through better categorisation. One massive improvement, based on your feedback was to make ordering dissertation topics and titles easier. This has now been done and it’s never been so easy to order them!

To further aid our visitors we decided to replace our old live chat system with a more streamlined version that allows us to answer more chats with you guys and keep a log of transcripts in case you need to come back to us in the future. This will allow us to be more responsive on future chats. If you ever need to talk to us then just look at the bottom of your screen and you’ll see a little live chat box there. If we are offline then you can leave us a message and we’ll get back to you when the office is open again.

We’ve also been busy updating our services page so that they display what you get from each service and have been structured in a way that you can quickly skim over them and find what you’re looking for.

Do you have any suggestions?

We are always making updates and improvements to ensure that our customers are kept happy every step of the way, so if you have any suggestions then please get in touch and let us know what we can do for you!

You should see what we’ve done!

The User Experience team or UE are responsible for the entire AA server infrastructure and the user facing applications, such as the Customer Control Panel and the Viper plagiarism scanner, that give all our users such a wonderful online experience. So if anything goes wrong, you can blame us.

Please remember, if you do happen to have a bad experience, please contact us and we will do our very best to put things right.

Like most tech teams, UE is a 100% male dominated microcosm. So, in order to bring a little of the feminine touch to the team, once a month one of us has to dress up in a flowery dress as a foxy lady and make the tea. Sorry, we can’t show you any photos. We did post one to Facebook but it got flagged as inappropriate content.

We all enjoyed a wonderful night out just before Xmas and Ian, our technical lead, scored a notable achievement of making it back home before sunrise. Rajeeva “the dancing diva” had us all mesmerized with his funky get down dancing.

George, one of our code monkeys, is a native of Greece and often has problems understanding some of our strange English expressions. For example, when we say “it’s raining cats and dogs” or “it’s looking a bit black over Bill’s mothers”, a perplexed look comes over his face and he wonders why feline and canine monstrosities aren’t falling from the sky and who the hell is Bill. Does he work downstairs?

We’re hoping that Bradford get past Villa in the big cup semi-final next week so that Wasim, our sysadmin extraordinaire and full-time football steward, won’t enter into a state of manic depression”.

UE has some big plans for 2013. Right now, a new version of our order form is being rolled out across all the AA sites as part of our ongoing quality initiatives. We also hope to implement revamps of our customer and writer facing applications so they look a little more modern and less like an online refugee from 1995.

P.S. Bonus points if you can spot the song references without looking it up on Wikipedia.

Are You Experienced?

Some, however, are more undecided about the possibility of making the step to metaphorically ‘fly the nest’ and feel that seeking out full-time employment at 16 or 18 would present a more beneficial career choice – they would certainly avoid a chunky amount of debt, after all.

Nevertheless, this post aims to address why university is beneficial to you and, as such, will focus upon six advantages of pursuing your education from someone who completed a degree course in 2010.
Without further ado, here is what you can look forward to at university.

1) Push you out of your comfort zone

Attending university at the typical age of 18 will push you completely out of your comfort zone and, every now and again, this can only be a good thing. It’s likely that you have lived in one part of the country and known the same people for your entire life. Here is your chance to see what’s beyond what you’ve become accustomed to and experience something different.

2) Gain some independence

In all likelihood, moving to university will be the first time that you have lived without your parents. Don’t underestimate the benefit of standing on your own two feet and doing things for yourself without the reliance upon Mum and Dad to cook your food and do your washing. Yes, it may seem like undertaking chores you’d rather not, but in the long run you’ll be grateful.

3) Meet new people

Inevitably, going to university will offer you the opportunity to meet a ton of new people and socialise on a regular basis. Grab this with two hands and interact with as many people as you can. You will find people who you get on with and those who you don’t – but that’s life and you’ll be all the better for it.

4) Manage your money

Another first for many university students is the ability to manage their personal finances. You will need to budget and be mindful of what you’re spending money on, how much it is and when. These skills will be invaluable for you in the future.

5) You make your own rules

Living with Mum and Dad can often mean living under somebody else’s house rules. Moving away from home allows you to make your own rules – and how can’t that be fun? Go to bed whenever you want, eat when you want and go out when you want – the possibilities are endless!

6) You may actually learn something

Last, and certainly not least, on this list is the benefit of the education itself. The primary function of university is to learn (although this article may suggest differently!) and undertaking your training seminars and lectures will ultimately provide you with the development you need to make the move into a career.

This guest post article is written by Matthew Wood for Britannia Training. Matthew specialises in developing quality, informative and unique content for a wealth of clients.

Six reasons why going to university is worth the hefty tuition fee

Important differences

The most obvious difference between an undergraduate and Master’s dissertation is length. A Master’s dissertation is likely to be at least twice as long as the longest Bachelor’s piece. This reflects the difference in focus between the types of course. As is common in education, the more advanced course is generally more focused, and so each individual piece of research or scholarship becomes more important. For a Master’s course, the written work will usually reflect one to two years’ work in a single piece; MPhil courses may ask for four years worth of work to be condensed into the final dissertation.

A more subtle, but perhaps more important difference, is the depth of analysis required in the dissertation. Indeed, the difference in length may be said to be mainly down to this fact. Whether students are performing original experiments or researching ancient documents for their Masters’ degrees, they will be expected to analyse each facet of their work and to discuss how it affects the field as a whole. Although candidates do not have to make entirely original contributions to their fields at Master’s level, they do have to show how their dissertation topics affect the field in general, at least to the extent of suggesting further research or applications.

Getting started

Some of the skills learned at the undergraduate level do come in handy when preparing to write a Master’s dissertation. Ensuring that any reading is completed in good time and that the student has made his or her own notes on the topics to promote understanding is a key factor. Similarly, it is important that sections are completed while the relevant information is fresh in the student’s mind. Several sections can be edited together later, and the whole piece made more coherent as further work is done, but unless ideas are noted as the arise, they are likely to be lost forever.

Top tips

The depth of research required is immense, and it is important for the student to leave enough time after that research to do some in-depth thinking and analysis. The best way to approach a long-form piece of writing such as a Master’s dissertation is as a long-term project. Planning each section of work and writing to a fixed time-scale with rewards and penalties as appropriate can help to keep the work flowing and motivate a student towards completion. There is little external impetus for a student to complete a Master’s dissertation, so it is important that this personal motivation is kept high where possible.

If you are in need need of some help with your masters dissertation then help is at hand.

Preparing for a Master’s Dissertation

Here at UKEssays we’ve just celebrated the festive season by having our Christmas bash. This got us thinking about how our followers like to celebrate.

Fancy winning a hamper full of yummy goodies to start off the festivities? Tell us and share your favourite student “festive” meal to cook for you and your mates and instantly enter to win a luxury food hamper. It doesn’t have to be fancy; It could be a twist on the traditional turkey with all the trimmings or an exotic vegetable curry.

Just write your idea in a comment below and share with your mates to enter. We will then pick our favourite idea and let you know the winner. The competition closes at midnight on 19th December 2012, so get posting those festive meal ideas!

Win a luxury hamper!

Being a student, out in the big wide world alone, must create quite a range of emotions, including; fear of the unknown, being responsible for their own well being and yet excitement about the new chapter in their life that is about to begin. Getting their first student loan must be like having a small lottery win! If they are lucky, they have a sense of responsibility to get them started. However, if not, that first loan can be in and out of their bank account faster than the consumption of the first pint of the night. The key to spending the loan wisely is to plan and budget.

Budget

Many students do not understand the logic to creating a sustainable budget. They may see this as the ‘bore factor’ to student life. However, it is extremely good practice for when studies have been completed to be able to create a budget and stick to it. Things to consider are:

- What items will be needed?

- What bills need to be paid?

- What is the frequency of items required and bill payments?

- How much money is available?

- What is the frequency of money received?

- How to allocate funds to each item

It would be very easy to take the money and blow it all in one go, effectively leaving nothing to live off. To avoid the dreaded ‘baked bean’ week, plan from the beginning to ensure survival.

Voucher Codes and Offers

Many students will not understand exactly how much pennies can add up. They see their mum on a Saturday evening, doing the supermarket dash and laugh about the coupons she frantically grabs on the way out the door. It is only now, when they need to make a budget of their own, that they will begin to understand the importance of the phrase ‘every penny counts’. There are many websites that will advertise the latest codes and offers. Some will be small savings, whilst others can be quite substantial. Many students will get into the habit of checking offers before they shop, looking around for the best deals and bargains.

Batch cook and freeze

For the first year of university, many students may have a diet consisting of beans, noodles and toast. These meals are easy to cook, yet cheap and affordable at the same time. They do, however, over time, discover how to cook affordable meals. Some students discover early on the art of batch cooking and freezing. They simply make larger portions of a favourite meal and freeze them into one meal portions for later consumption, saving them money on future meals and time cooking later on.

Know when to visit a supermarket

Many supermarkets will sell off fresh produce at discounted prices at closing times at the weekend. Lots of these products can be frozen to give them a longer life. Discover which supermarket offers the best deals and take advantage of these on a weekly basis.

For many students, being away from home is like a holiday at first. Reality soon kicks in when they realise that they are suddenly responsible for their own well being. With a little plan of action, student life can be very pleasant and budgeting and planning can help ease the stress that so often comes with becoming a responsible young adult.

Student loans – how to spend them wisely

See the perfect recipe for finding the right essay writing company or writing an essay of your own!

Click the image below to see a larger version of the image or read the entire article here…

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Read our Essay Writing Scams and company reviews page to help put your mind at rest.

Infographic – The Recipe for The Perfect Essay

Uganda has a long history of internal conflict and Geoffrey became another victim of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) when he was barbarically attacked by a group of rebels, accusing him of being a government soldier.  The rebels, often child soldiers themselves, proceeded to hideously mutilate Geoffrey, cutting off his ears, lips and fingers.   Geoffrey begged the rebels to kill him but mercy was something alien to his attackers.

Whilst recovering in a hospital bed in Kitgum, Northern Uganda, Geoffrey came across one of his attackers who had himself been shot in another attack.  Geoffrey was justly full of animosity and thoughts of revenge, but he chose to forgive his attacker, discovering that he had himself been abducted and forced to join the LRA.

Geoffrey in his Kitgum shop.

Nine years later, Geoffrey still struggles to make a living.  He originally opened a small bakery in Kitgum after leaving hospital, followed by his own grocery store, but business slowed, and Geoffrey was unable to work the nearby farmlands like his friends.  Geoffrey’s four year old son Isaac had been turned away from nursery for unpaid fees and times were tough.

With the help of the BBC, All Answers made contact with Geoffrey and offered to pay Isaac’s full tuition fees for the coming year.   We feel it is important to give something back to the less fortunate people in the world, and through no fault of his own Geoffrey had his education snatched from him.  For the sake of just £350, we have been able to provide Isaac with another full years’ worth of education, giving him the chance to flourish and enjoy his childhood, something Geoffrey was cruelly denied.

Geoffrey was ecstatic to receive our donation.

Geoffrey Obita & All Answers

The All Answers team went to Centre Parcs well equipped to avoid any thirst issues

Centre Parcs has been an engrained tradition within the company since 2003, allowing everyone at AA to let off some steam at the end of the busy exam period.  This year was no different; barbecues’ saunas and alcohol were the backbone of the weekend with a few members of staff nursing headache’s come Monday morning.  Centre Parcs is also the location for AA’s very own version of “The Oscar’s” – when staff members are awarded trophies based on achievements throughout the year.

AA Spirit Award Winner Lee Funnell with After Care manager Daniel Dennehy at Center Parcs

One of AA’s most recent haunts has been a Greek restaurant known as Emilio’s, about half a mile away from the office serving traditional Greek grub.  Bar a few missing entrées and botched deserts, meals at Emilio’s go down very well with the AA team in attendance, it’s a shame about the other patrons who often end up witnessing the horrific site of some members of staff partaking in traditional Greek dancing!

The AA team enjoying a meal at Emilio’s restaurant

We haven’t JUST been stuffing our faces with Moussaka and bellies with beer recently, as our very own CEO Tony Eynon has launched an All Answers paintball division named The Marauders.   The team have mustered their weapons and are currently training in the mountain terrain of Afghanistan (ok maybe just the local park) in preparation for monthly battles in the Millennium paintball league.

Tony and Wasim checking out the new paintball gear at the office

All Answers Social Round-Up