Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I've always been a believer in innovation, especially when it comes to generating potential solutions to protecting our environment. I truly believe that it will be down to individual minds, thinking outside the box, who will massively modernise our current, non-environmentally friendly way of working. As I'm sure many of you already know, one of our biggest issues to do with the environment, is our over-consumption of plastic and the shear amount the ends up in our oceans. As of thus far, I have not seen many potentially viable solutions to resolve this problem. Apart from Boyan Slatt, who created the first ocean's clean up system, there hasn't been something that everyone could get involved in. However, it was when my mum bought these eco-friendly cleaning tablets during her weekly shopping on Monday, that I was reminded of a pretty brilliant pitch that I saw delivered by two innovators on Dragon's Den. Altho...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Over the weekend, I learned a new and very important skill and that was Makaton. As you all already know, I've been working part-time as a support worker at Project 21 Cambridge for around 4 months now. My role as a support worker is to support Down's Syndrome youths in their musical theatre classes. My job includes making sure that everyone feels happy and comfortable in every class, trying to get people to join in all the activities, and ensuring that everyone's needs are met whilst they attend each session.  However, I've found that as passionate as I am about my work, there's always been a barrier in the way I could support all the students and that barrier was mainly in the communication side of things. Sometimes, during a session, I would walk up to one of the students in the hall just to check up on them and see how they're getting on and instead of speaking to me, they would sign things at me becaus...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I remember watching the film, Doctor Zhivago, a few months ago with my family, after being recommended it by my grandmother. The film was released in 1965 and it was based on the events that took place before, during, and after the Russian Revolution. Despite it not being my favourite film to watch, there's one scene that I remember well and that has struck a chord with me because it seemed to reflect everything that I'm experiencing and seeing today. On one scene,  Zhivago boards the train to Yuriatin to join a group of people who will be assisting the Russian military committee on the front. When the train stops at a station, the Russian communist commandant, who had just informed everyone on board of their duties, leaves the train chanting something like "long live the revolution" whilst another man on board shouts "long live anarchy! Lickspittle! Bureaucrat!...I am the only free man on this train! The res...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Last Sunday, I watched the England vs Italy Euro 2020 final at the pub with my family. Although, I am by no means a football fan or an expert at football. Everytime someone even brings up the word football, I get very vivid flashbacks to those awful secondary school PE classes, where I had to play football with a bunch of boys who did not want me to be there. I think being on the sidelines of most of the games I played in the past, says a lot about my talent. 😂😂 However, this was the first time since the 1960s, that England was in a major final of a football match and actually had a chance of winning. As a result, when my mum found out on Instagram that there were two more tables left for the football match at the pub, we practically jumped at the chance of being there. When we arrived at the pub, everyone was panicking and at first, I didn't understand why. Then I realised that the pub manager was rushing around because his...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  This week, I performed in my school's production called Come Alive. As I've mentioned before, over the past two months or so, I've been rehearsing the IB dance rock 'n' roll number as well as the musical theatre Come Alive performance school piece for the show and this week, I was finally able to show my work. Due to the current Covid-19 situation, the show had to be spread out across three nights so that we didn't have too many people in the audience at once. As a result, we all performed on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings, and my performances were largely a success. I really liked dancing in front of a real life audience as, with the pandemic, I wasn't able to do that. It's been nearly two years since I've done a show so to be able to dance in front of people again, was really refreshing. I know that this aspect of the performance world really suffered during the pandemic, so I think...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  It's strange to say this but in a few day's time, I would have finished year 12 - my first year of sixth form! Looking back on everything that has happened this year, all I can say is that so much about me has changed and all for the better as well. When I look back at the person I used to be in September compared to the person I am today, other people may not see this, but I can certainly tell that there's a big difference in who I am now. If you've been following my whole sixth form journey so far, you will have known that I came into September 2020 as a very nervous and shy individual who had virtually no idea of what the IB course was going to be like, what new friends I would make, and how I would get on with everything. I struggled to approach the people who I would call my friends today. But I could tell from the beginning that my school had a very warm environment and I did feel accepted. Almost instantly, ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Recently, I just found out some rather annoying news that may disrupt some of my original plans for working over the summer. Over the holidays, I was supposed to be working a couple days with the Down's Syndrome charity, Project 21, through helping out with their day trips and dance sessions. However, because my school schedule was quite busy, I obviously didn't sign up quite quick enough for the days that I had wanted to do so other people got there before me. As my boss has already got members of staff for those days, I can't work there over the summer. My boss did suggest working on the 21st of August, assisting with the Matilda workshop at the Jerwood Dancehouse in Ipswich, but I would be coming back from holiday on that day, so it's not really possible. I was a bit annoyed at the situation but I suppose lesson learnt. If I really wanted the job, I should have perhaps applied a bit quicker because everyone is l...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, (Or should I say, welcome to post number 1 of Life After Sixth Form?) 😂 Yes, it feels a little bit weird talking about my future plans now for when I leave sixth form in 2022, but I thought it would be the right time to start this series as year 12 is already drawing to a close and I will be entering my final year of college in September!😬 Scary times. On this series, I will just be updating you on what I'm doing to prepare for when I leave (e.g. looking at potential plans, writing personal statements, visiting universities, taking exams, and finding out where I want to be when I graduate) and hopefully I can look back on my journey in a year's time and see how far I've come. In today's post however, I will be talking about how I'm getting on with writing my personal statement for dance courses that I could potentially apply for. Right now, I think it's still a bit up in the air about what it is that I rea...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  If you're a close friend of mine or follow me on Instagram, you will know that on Sunday the 4th of July, I celebrated my 17th birthday and it was great. In the morning, I opened all my presents with my family. I received a variety of different things like shorts, some new t-shirts, Japanese sweets, chocolates, and candles. I was really grateful for everything that I got and it was a nice morning spent with the family. In the afternoon, I invited my two friends from sixth form, Maia and Teresa. As I'm sure many of you already know, I go to an international sixth from college so Maia's from Italy and Teresa's from Poland and I found that they both connected with my family because we're fairly international too. I was unsure how the day was going to turn out because they had never been round my house before but we all ended up having a really great time. I introduced them to my family, showed them around the hous...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  A couple of weeks ago, I told you guys about how my IB dance mock examination went and what I got for the exam. If you missed the post, I ended up getting a 5b for the solo that I choreographed and performed to my teacher. It was a grade that I was reasonably happy with but  I know that I can get a little bit higher than that when it comes to doing my actual dance examination. However, today I'm going to be sharing with you my full May 2021 IB mock exam grades. When I opened my results, I was definitely happy with some of the grades that I got. In English and history I was able to achieve some pretty good grades and it really was a reflection of how much work I put in to achieve this. Despite this, I was still a little bit disheartened with the other results that I saw because in some of the papers, I did try my best and the outcome was not exactly what I had wanted to get. Nonetheless, I was still somewhat happy that I m...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Firstly, if you're still here, thank you so much for sticking by! I know that my publishing schedule this week has been particularly atrocious and I do sincerely apologise for that. Sometimes, as an IB student, I have very little time to do anything and this week has been stressful so my uploading times have gone down the toilet. Here is me attempting to make ammends by actually taking the time to write and put something out there. I hope you enjoy. 😂💜 Ever since I returned from my work experience back in June, I've been rehearsing for the upcoming school dance show that is beginning on the 13th of July. Don't ask me how the school managed to launch a show in the midst of a pandemic. All I know is that it was a pain to organise and now I have to live up to the effort. As a result in rehearsals for these past few weeks, I've been rock n' rolling my little heart out and whilst for the most part it has been fun,...