Event cancelled: Summer '20 Residential Experience

Sunday 5 - Thursday 9 July 2020

Event Update

The University of Essex has now agreed to adopt additional action to protect our staff, students and our wider community against the spread and impact of COVID-19. As the number of cases in the UK increases, we have taken pre-emptive steps to protect members of our community from the risk of infection. 

From Monday 23 March we started implementing enhanced protection measures, which, amongst other steps included suspending all University public events and gatherings, including our face to face schools engagement work. 

This therefore means that, unfortunately this event has had to be cancelled.  

We appreciate you may already have transport in place for these events, if you are outside your cancellation period for coaches or are unable to claim the money back from your school insurance please let us know by contacting outreach@essex.ac.uk.

We know this will be as disappointing to you as it is to us, and we do hope that you and your students can continue to be supported by the University of Essex virtually through resources that we are currently developing.

With access to all of our facilities, you will explore, debate and discuss issues of global importance in either Sports and Exercise Science, English Literature, Business Studies or one of our award-winning THINK series topics. Attend lectures, workshops or lab sessions, present your ideas, meet interesting, like-minded people and have the summer of a lifetime whilst you're doing it!

At the end of it, you'll have a university level piece of work, a new network of contacts and the confidence to go out and bag the future of your dreams!

What you need to do:

Complete the online application form

As part of the application, you will need to write 500 words on one topic; this should be the topic you want to study during the Summer Experience. You can choose from:

• Mental Health Uncut: Discuss the role social media plays in the development of body image/self-esteem in young people today.
• Too many humans? To help tackle the effects of climate change, there should be a limit on the number of children people can have. Argue passionately for or against.
• RIP Democracy? Critics claim that Brexit symbolises the death of democracy in the UK. Discuss if, and how, these issues affect young people in the UK today.
• Sport and Exercise Science: Tell us about a sports person, coach, or team, you admire. You should only write about one person, coach or team. Think about their abilities and/or performance in the following areas: technical/tactical, psychological, physical and social.
• Business Studies: Write about somebody in business you admire. Tell us why you think they make a good business person. Think about their professional image, behaviour and reputation.
• English Literature: Delve into the fascinating world of relationships by immersing yourself in one of our key texts (download below) - we've selected a short play, a short story and a group of poems for you to choose from. You may want to critically analyse how relationships are depicted in your text by writing an essay. Alternatively, you may feel inspired to write a poem, song, rap, short story, piece of drama, epilogue or prologue. Any such response is acceptable.

Top tip! We recommend writing your answer before you start. Then you can copy/paste into the application form. You don’t need to be an expert; we just want to see that you’ve got some interesting ideas.

We’ll aim to let you know if you’ve been successful by end of June.

What your teacher needs to do:

Your teacher needs to submit a short reference. We cannot consider your application without this.

What your parents/guardians need to do:

Nothing, unless you are successful. If your application is successful, we’ll be in touch to ask for parent/guardian consent, medical/dietary information and emergency contacts. If we don’t hear from your parents/guardians then we’ll have to reallocate your place.