Like many international students, I have struggled with my finances throughout my time in university. To reduce the stress load of my parents, I have tried different ways to finance my daily expenses. After trying out different methods of earning an income, I have used three ways to finance my daily life expenses: tutoring, student ambassador, and investing.
Tutoring
Tutoring is one of the easiest and steadiest ways to earn an income. Back in Hong Kong during my second year, I figured that more and more parents were starting to find private tutors given Covid had caused many schools to close down temporarily. In addition, since Zoom has become an increasingly popular tool for meetings and classes, I have since started using zoom lessons to teach different lessons remotely, such as Science, Maths, English and Debating.
Whilst this has given me a considerable and steady income, the limitation of tutoring is that you need time to prepare the lessons and balance your university work with the lessons which sometimes can be stressful. Moreover, tutoring may also not be suitable for everyone as it requires tutors to be patient and passionate. If you aren’t passionate about helping children, you might not only affect the student’s performance but also lead to internal stress and pressure.
Student ambassador
Another stable source of income is a role that the University offers to students every year. As an AMBS student, I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of the student ambassadors for AMBS. My main responsibility is to write blogs like this one and the ones before every month. I think this not only gave me some income to pay for my expenses, it also helped me to reflect on my university life and the different life lessons I learned throughout.
Apart from writing blogs, there are also many other things you can do as student ambassadors, such as taking people on trips and tours around the university, chatting with students through the university website and answering their enquires, helping out in university events, etc. The important thing as a student ambassador is to find something you are passionate about so that the work won’t seem like a drag, but instead something you actively enjoy doing whilst financing your expenses.
Another student ambassador role I took up recently is to create an ITMB poster for prospective students across the UK. As someone who is quite interested in creative design, this is a really interesting endeavour for me and I have been enjoying the group discussions and brainstorming so far as I feel like I am really creating value for my course and the university.
Investing
I am sure many of you have heard about investing early due to the constant threat of inflation. I have started to look into investing this year only and I am still in the process of learning all about the subject. Whilst there is a certain risk in doing so, I believe investing is a great way to not only expand your portfolio but also learn about the different market trends and understand why the market is making such reactions.
