Dave's Dispatch: The End of 2014 at Kaplan Covent Garden

Hello, everyone! My name is Dave Rogers, and I work with the Social Program at Kaplan International London Covent Garden. New students from all over the world arrive every week and I am responsible for welcoming them to London and helping them to enjoy their time in the city!

Christmas is here at last!

Kaplan Covent Garden has been filled with good cheer and merriment recently, mainly because of the rumor that Santa may be visiting the school in the next week…

Students have prepared Christmas cards and have posted them into the very special Post Box that the study center have made, hoping that Santa will deliver the cards to their friends during lessons!

Also, everyone is getting ready for Christmas Jumper Day on Friday. The idea is that everyone wears the silliest, most ridiculous Christmas jumper they can find to raise money for charity.

Students can buy jumpers directly from the Social Program desk if they want to – we have an amazing range of designs, from Santa jumpers that say ‘HO HO HO’ when you squeeze them, to squirrels in Christmas hats and the snowman from Frozen saying ‘I love hugs!’ I imagine the students would feel very cool when wearing those!

Thinking about Christmas also causes us to consider the year ahead. We’re currently selling an awesome calendar for 2015 that was made with photographs taken by London Kaplan students. All of the proceeds from selling the calendars will go to the same charity mentioned above. It’s called Plan UK, and the idea behind the charity is that it helps to build schools for young girls in Senegal.

It’s an amazing cause, and Kaplan students are very passionate about raising money for it.

Next year is going to be an excellent year for the Social Program in London, starting with an exciting New Year’s Eve spent watching the Mayor’s fireworks display! When school starts again we have an extensive list of activities planned, including a day in Cambridge, a trip to Edinburgh for Burn’s night, musicals like Cats and the Lion King, a tour of Harry Potter Studios, and many more thrilling things for our students to do!

But let’s not forget to take time to reflect on the year that is about to finish. 2014 was very special for me because it was the first year I spent working for the Social Program in Covent Garden. I’ve met lots of interesting people and have done lots of amazing things with them – tea and whiskey tasting, bowling, boat trips, Beatles tours, trips to Bruges, Cambridge, Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands, drinks at the Ice Bar, tours of Wembley stadium, and lots of other cool activities; too many to list!

I’d like to thank all the students for making the last year so very special, and I look forward to seeing you again and meeting lots more of you in the year ahead.

For now though, have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!