uk

If I could have named one thing about the UK that I was sure would definitely not in a million years impress me, it would have been its beaches. I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by beaches of warm deep blue Caribbean waters and the whitest, finest sand. After spending many summers in Varadero, Cuba's most famous beach, not even its Miami or Hawaii counterparts were able to fulfill me. I thus did not look forward to visiting UK beaches, and only did so because the International Students House Travel Club organized a day trip to Brighton, a beach resort area on the south coast of the country.

As it turns out, Brighton did impress me. Sure, the sand looked dark and rocky, and the water colder than one could bear. But the beautiful Brighton Pier seemed to smile under a radiant sun. Parents and their children came to the pier in colorful clothes, sampling the many restaurants, arcade and fairground attractions. Along the seafront row, thousands of the finest automobiles lined up for InCarNation 1000, a show that celebrates the UK's best 1000 modified and performance cars. The day smelled of happiness and spring, and blooming flowers adorned the many terrace cafes offering delicious meals at surprisingly low prices.

When I received the admissions letter in 2005, Harvard was already a familiar place. Even before I applied, I had visited the university, checked out the campus party scene, attended information sessions, met my admissions officer, and gotten involved in the Cuban student group events. I thus began my undergraduate career with a fairly accurate sense of what awaited me in the next four years.

Arriving at LSE

My introduction to LSE was contrastingly abrupt. Before I knew it, classes arrived and I saw myself in Houghton Street absorbing everything for the first time. Of course, I was unprepared for the rushed course selection process, and the unavailability of professor and course evaluations as a public guide for students did not make the task easier. I was surprised to find that there were virtually no British people in my classes, as the majority of my classmates came from other European countries and North America. The school calendar shocked me; my unthinkable number of holidays included two months to study for finals!

You have probably heard that new visa regulations were announced last week by the British Home Secretary, Theresa May. If you are already studying in the UK and hope to stay here to work after university then you may understandably be worried about these changes.

Post-Study Work Visas

To make it clear how the Post-Study Work visa regulations have changed, here are the basics:

• The Post-Study Work Route that allows students free access to work in the UK for 2 years after they finish studying is being closed.

• To stay and work, you must have a job offer from a sponsoring employer. This means that the firm has been registered with the government to accept overseas workers in the Tier-2 visa point system.

• The job must be suitable for your skills and the starting salary must be a minimum of £20,000 a year.

• This starts in April 2012, so students graduating this year will not be affected.

Working whilst you are studying

There are also tighter regulations on working whilst still a student:

The British Home Secretary Theresa May announced today that the number of non-EU students granted a visa to the UK is going to be cut by up to 80,000 a year.

The announcement is part of the government’s drive to scale down immigration to the UK to just tens of thousands by 2015, and is likely to reduce foreign student visas by as much as 25%. Of the proposal, May told MPs:

“It will protect our world-class institutions. It will stop the abuse that became all too common under Labour and it will restore some sanity to our student visa system."

“Fake Colleges”

However, away from these headline grabbing statistics, what do these new regulations actually mean to your standard student hoping to study in the UK?

Well, the proposals are basically aimed at stopping people from manipulating the system in order to simply get a UK visa. At the moment the government say there are thousands of non-EU inhabitants every year who get student visas with no intention of actually studying in the UK.