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Wednesday 8 September 2010

My Experience of the Clearing Office

As a games student I am used to spending hours in front a screen staring at the endless goal I can’t seem to reach which came in handy when dealing with clearing. For the job we all had three days of intensive training finished off with our first mock calls (to be honest it put the fear of god in all of us!).

My first caller was Leona Lewis; it's nice to know that we were attracting such high profile people to the university. The enquiry was not too hard as I just had to look for keywords and that is where the answer would lie. Onto the next caller and I thought this was getting easy and started by taking all the details down.
“Can I take your surname?” to which I heard "err umm" so following training I repeated the question “sorry could I take you surname?” the mock caller then a little confused spelt out the name A-H-E-M; first lesson learnt always listen very carefully!

I am now gearing towards the end of clearing for this year and I have to say it has been a brilliant yet challenging experience. To describe it to someone else I would again have to refer to my program and say it is one big game with a lot more at stake.

Like a game, clearing is a series of obstacles that all be needed to be overcome to get to the final goal. It involved sifting through reams of information, receiving questions, pitching some to my supervisor and finally getting to the core and helping out the caller. And when the game is over its one game I will want to replay in the future.