Volume Thirty • Number Ten • 17 March 2003 

Careers events best ever

The new team in the Careers Service has finished its first series of high profile career events. Following the success of the two networking evenings, Media and Public Affairs on 19 February and NGOs, Social Research and Political Consultancies on 20 February, the Disability Careers Forum on 25 February, and the Alternative Careers Fair on 8 March, proved to be equally popular with students and employers alike.

The events were the result of successful partnerships forged by the Careers team with the Students Union, the Management Society, the Alumni Relations Office, the Alumni Environmental and Media Networks and the Disabled Students Society.

Over 80 companies and organisations participated in the four events which were attended by over 1,800 students interested in careers beyond the financial and consulting world. There was a huge range of presentations and stands, from the United Nations, BBC, The Guardian Group, New Philanthropy Capital, the World Service, New Policy Institute, Fewer, the National Magazine Company Limited, the Institute of Communication Ethics, VSO, Health Unlimited, Scope and Save the Children.

The themed networking evenings marked the inaugural event in the new Student Services Centre Atrium. As students flocked in to mingle and network their way around the worlds of media and NGOs, they learnt the essential tips on getting into each sector. Advice given ranged from the traditional internship to sheer persistence!

The Disability Careers Forum focused on the pros and cons of the graduate job search, recruitment and selection for those with disabilities. Feedback from students showed how important it is to empower students in their own job search and provide a clear, informative and objective advice.

These themes were also present in the Alternative Careers Fair. This all-day event not only filled the Atrium with a range of potential employers and voluntary opportunities, it also offered a series of talks from guest speakers about how to get into alternative careers, from environmental consultancy to fundraising.

All participating organisations commented on the quality and motivation of the LSE students and alumni they met. Feedback from students was very positive and shows the need for many more of these focused careers events, covering the full range of graduate jobs.

The Careers Service hopes to make these events a regular occurrence. For further details please email Esther Foreman or Fiona Sandford at: careers@lse.ac.uk.

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Building a new Europe

On Saturday 15 March, LSE hosted a meeting on five projects of the wide-ranging One Europe or Several? research programme, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Under the theme of institutional reform, citizenship and civil society in the enlarged Europe, the meeting brought together academic researchers and policy experts working on such areas as institutional reform in the EU, the transformation of institutions in the countries which are expected to join the EU next year, civil and political rights, local and European identities, and immigration. The all-day meeting centred on three workshops: Institutional Reform in the Enlarged Europe; European Citizenship, Mobility and Migration; and A European Civil Society?

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Hellenic Observatory

The European Security and the New Global Challenges event, held on Tuesday 4 March and organised by the Hellenic Observatory and LSE, was a major opportunity to connect with the agenda of the Greek Presidency of the European Union. It was also the first conference the Observatory had organised with the Defence Analysis Institute (IAA) in Athens.

The LSE Hellenic Observatory intends to seize similar opportunities in the future to relate the discussion of contemporary Greece to themes of wider European concern.

The afternoon session with Yannos Papantoniou, Hellenic minister of national defence and EU council president, Alessandro Minuto Rizzo, NATO deputy secretary general and Paul Beaver, defence analyst, elicited positive responses and provided the basis for extensive media coverage. The evening discussion was with taken by Roger Boyes, the Times, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, King's College London, Quentin Peel, Financial Times, and Professor Paul Taylor, director of the European Institute, LSE.

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Student tutoring success

More than 120 people attended the Student Tutoring party last week to acknowledge the work of around 200 LSE students who assist teachers in the classrooms of London state schools.

The scheme aims to help improve academic performance and to encourage pupils to go on to higher education. Students work in schools for up to a morning or afternoon a week for a minimum of ten weeks. Many students this year have actually opted to tutor for longer than this.

The BP-funded scheme is co-ordinated by LSE graduate Laura Hales, who was herself a student tutor at a comprehensive school in Islington while studying for her degree.

Two special certificates were presented to final year undergraduates Rachel Sully (business, maths and statistics), and Farzan Bilimoria (economics) who have been student tutors for all three years of their LSE courses. Both helped to publicise the scheme and prepare new student tutors. Rachel now plans to become a teacher after graduating while Farzan intends to pursue a legal career.

Rachel Gourdin, BP, explained why the scheme is so important to them, how it fits in with their other education projects, and thanked the students for their hard work. Director Anthony Giddens also thanked the students and described how the scheme formed an integral part of LSE's widening participation activities.

If you would like to find out more about Student Tutoring at LSE please contact Laura Hales, ext 7379 or email: l.hales@lse.ac.uk.

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Academics abroad

Michael Power, P D Leake Professor of Accounting and co-director of CARR, visited Australia in February where he was a guest of the Regulatory Institutions Network at the Australian National University, Canberra.

He was also a keynote speaker at a conference on Auditing in Perspective: regulatory tool, moribund remedy or democratic champion? where he spoke on Evaluating the Audit Explosion. This was followed by a public lecture on Risk Management and Corporate Social Responsibility at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra.

Professor Power was also a visitor to the Department of Accounting at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he gave a seminar entitled The Invention of Operational Risk.

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What price happiness?

This year's Lionel Robbins Memorial lectures were given by Professor Richard Layard and looked at the subject of happiness. Held over three consecutive evenings (3-5 March), they attracted widespread public and media interest.

A Guardian leader described Professor Layard as a 'modern day Jeremy Bentham', plunging into new disciplines, like psychology, criminology and neuroscience, to argue that the pursuit of happiness should be 'the prime purpose of public policy.' Layard also set out his views on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week.

His starting point was that, while per capita GNP has been rising steadily in the US and the rest of the industrial world for the last 50 years, measured happiness has not. Systematic surveys and the figures for clinical depression, crime and the rates of suicide and death from cirrhosis of the liver all confirm this fact.

How, he asked, can these findings be squared with the fact that the average rich person is happier than the average poor person? His answer was that, above some absolute basic level of income like $15,000 a year, happiness is conditioned by what you get used to and by comparison with 'the Jones'. Getting central heating makes you happier at the time, but it then becomes an essential. Those living in the former East Germany are on average much better off economically since 1990, but they are much less happy, because their comparison is now with West Germans, instead of Poles and Russians.

Challenging the theories of public economics developed over the years by LSE economists like Lionel Robbins, James Meade, Amartya Sen and Tony Atkinson, Richard Layard argued for a return to a Benthamite concern for the greatest happiness of the greatest number and for modifying the view that encouraging individuals to pursue their own selfish goals is the best way to promote well-being in society as a whole.

All three lectures can be view at: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/events/lectures/

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Debate

LSESU Question Time Society

Nicholas Parsons, Andrew Housley, Bill Oddie and Alan Davies
The Future of British Culture

Tuesday 18 March, 1pm, Old Theatre

Questions are likely to focus on such subjects as dumbing down, the impact of fundamentalism on British culture and the continuing integration of ethnic minorities into British society.

Students and staff only. Email: a.z.rowe@lse.ac.uk.

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Peace demands an offensive defence

By Dominick Jenkins, Centre for the Study of Global Governance

Bush has defined the terms of the Iraqi debate. 'We' are the guardians of law - 'they' are the outlaw. Chemical, biological and nuclear weapons are a reality. Hence we must be prepared to launch a pre-emptive war.

The peace movement has been good at turning the debate around: 'You are for law, then get a Security Council Resolution'. But if it is not to remain on the defensive, the movement now needs to expose how Bush's 'realities' have been produced. This means looking at how the claim that 'we' are civilised is created by excluding our own complicity in global disasters.

I have started to do this in my book, The Final Frontier: America, science and terror, which looks at how America relaunched imperialism in 1917 by making Germany the scapegoat for the First World War. Mike Davis does this with regard to capitalism, imperialism and the creation of the third world in his book, Late Victorian Holocausts. Now it is time for the peace movement to re-examine the role of Britain and America in the Iran-Iraq war. After all, as the 19th century Prussian military thinker Von Clausewitz himself stressed, the best strategy is an offensive defence.

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IT Services/Library training courses

IT Services: IT training for staff
You must book on http://ittraining.lse.ac.uk.

Monday 17 March

• PowerPoint 2000: introduction 2-5pm

Tuesday 18 March

• Outlook 2000: appointments, meetings and tasks 10.30am-12pm

Wednesday 19 March

• Excel 2000: intermediate 2-5pm

Thursday 20 March

• Excel 2000: charting 2-3.30pm

Library: information skills training for all
No booking. All classes in Library Training Room.

Monday 17 March

• EndNote 1 1-2pm

Wednesday 19 March

• Basic infoskills 3: modifying a search 11am-12pm

Thursday 20 March

• EndNote 2 1-2pm

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Careers consulting for staff

The LSE Staff Development Unit is pleased to announce that it can now offer staff regular access to a qualified careers consultant, working independently for us within the School. The service includes:

• access to an accredited and well-known personality questionnaire, which is used as a building block to the whole process.
• access to a range of self-assessment exercises that give each individual an opportunity to review skills, values, strengths and opportunities.
• follow up telephone support, to maintain impetus and focus.

The next date for this service is Thursday 20 March. Staff wishing to take advantage of this facility should arrange an appointment with our careers coach at Blue Sky directly. Email: blue.sky@which.net or phone 020 8692 8592.

Any staff wishing to use the service provided by Blue Sky Career Consulting must negotiate times during the working day with local managers.

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Disability equality

Additional rest room for students with disabilities
This is situated on the ground floor of the Old Building, next to A21, the current rest room. Hopefully, this new facility will go some way to meeting the needs of students who, for a variety of disability-related reasons, need somewhere to lie down during the day. This was one of the issues highlighted during the 'lie-in' occupation of the Student Services Centre during Disability Awareness Week.

New website
Disabled students will now be able to access information about the support available to them at higher education institutions across Europe from one central source at: www.heagnet.org. Seventeen European countries, in co-operation with the European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education, have participated in an EC-funded project to develop this website.

The UK partner for this project is Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities. The website features general information about studying in each country as a disabled student, a searchable database of information about the support available, links to useful advice agencies and government bodies and to individual higher education institutions across Europe.

Barbara Waters, chief executive of Skill, said: 'When disabled students are deciding where to study they need to know that they will be able to access any support they need. The new website gives people a centralised source of information in their own language about the support available right across Europe. We hope that this will help disabled people in the UK to feel confident about studying in other parts of Europe. The site will also be a valuable resource for disabled students in other parts of Europe who are interested in finding out about the support that UK institutions can offer them.'

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New online journal

Graduate students everywhere are beginning painstaking hours of research and long nights in the library to write papers only a few professors will read. These will then be filed away in university archives - works of genius hidden away.

But what if there was a place where graduate students could publish their papers, and research other graduate students' work? Or a way to discuss different types of research and methodologies through interdisciplinary programmes with other students and professors throughout Europe? Well, now there is.

The Graduate Journal of Social Science (GJSS) was started last year by students from the Free University of Amsterdam and the University of London. It has received financial support from the Academy of World Studies, and is currently working towards funding from the EC, ESRC, and others.

The deadline for the journal's first call for papers is 1 May. 

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Say it with...

Don't forget - Sunday 30 March is Mothers' Day. Why not get that 'just right' card at the SU shop. They've got a wide selection to choose from. Plus, why not get her something uniquely LSE? Come along and have a browse.

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Media bites

'This is the first time in his career [Tony Blair] has done something unpopular. Normally he looked over his shoulder and wanted to please everyone. No one seriously believes Saddam has nuclear weapons, and the biological and chemical stuff is a lot of hooey. You can't go to war on that.'

Meghnad Desai, The State.com, 13/02/03

'Even if your aim is that, overall, you want to make sure that people pay the same share of their income in tax in total, you probably need a progressive income tax system in order to offset the fact that the indirect taxes - the taxes on things like consumer items - are going to be 'regressive,' in other words, [they will weigh] more heavily on the poor'.

John Hill, Radio Free Europe, 14/02/03

'A critical moment comes when kids go into secondary school, feel vulnerable, and get 'recruited' by older kids in exchange for protection. Most offenders are boys - girls are more likely to be involved in shoplifting. Sadly, the attitude of many parents of perpetrators was, 'What can you expect, he's a boy?'

Marian FitzGerald, Times Online, 22/02/03

'It is clear that educational inequality... has tended to rise in recent years. Even the sharp expansion of university participation of the 1990s did not benefit poorer children. If anything, it strengthened the position of the middle classes.'

Steve Machin, The Observer, 23/02/03

'It's as if he [Bush] doesn't speak a whole paragraph. He says a sentence. And then pauses. And then another sentence... as if each sentence were a self-contained little speech.'

Rodney Barker, The Miami Herald, 24/02/03

'On the basis of the information publicly available, there is no justification under international law for the use of military force against Iraq. The UN charter outlaws the use of force with only two exceptions: individual or collective self-defence in response to an armed attack and action authorised by the security council as a collective response to a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression.'

Christine Chinkin, Gerry Simpson, Deborah Cass, The Guardian, 7/03/03

'The starkly different positions staked out by the US on one side and Germany and France on the other mean the conflict will reverberate long after Baghdad has been disarmed. Four post-World War Two pillars have been impacted by the crisis: the UN, the EU, Nato and transatlantic ties. The extent of damage to these institutions can only be calculated in the coming years.'

Christopher Coker, The New Zealand Herald, 10/03/03

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Lunchtime concert

The final concert of term on Thursday 20 March, 1.05pm, in the Shaw Library, will be a piano recital by Grace Francis, an outstanding young performer and a winner at the Zagreb International Piano Competition.

Her programme comprises Brahms, Sonata in F# minor, and Liszt, Liebestraum No 3, Vallee D'Obermann, and the Mephisto Waltz No 1. Free entry. All welcome.

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Noticeboard

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LSE News & Views is published every Monday during term by the Press & Information Office. Printed by Reprographics Department. The aim is to provide a means of communication for all members of the School as well as news and information about people and activities. Articles, news and photographs are welcome. Contributions should be sent to Toni Sym, Press & Information Office, 6th Floor, Tower 1, to arrive NO LATER THAN ONE WEEK before publication date. All personal ads carry a standard charge of £2 for up to 50 words.

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