Meet our November Wow winners...

This month we're celebrating an incredible team from Wellbeing Support Services. Their Warwick Wow Award recognises how they improved the experience for thousands of students as they joined the Warwick community.

Want to say well done? Log in to congratulate our winning colleagues in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

Events and Community Engagement, Residential Community Team

The team identified a gap in the arrivals experience, with activities geared towards Welcome Week, while residential students arrived on campus earlier. They collaborated with departments including Warwick Presents, Wellbeing colleagues and the Students' Union to create a programme of events from Thursday to Sunday of Arrivals Weekend - a first for Warwick. Events included Q&A sessions with support services, performances by student societies, and activities like Chinese Chess, crafts, and speed-friending.

Students were able to connect with their community from the point they arrived, and parents could see services and get an insight into student life.

Transcript

Stuart: So this month for our Wows winners, we've come to Senate House, fairly iconic. What this team did is they worked out that there were some of our new students arriving that weren't connecting with all of our programme when we built it up. So they built back from Welcome Week, a programme so that all of those students from when they first arrived would feel part of the whole campus experience. It's a wonderful thing they've done, so let's go and congratulate them as our winners of this month's Wows!

Stuart: Hello? Hello. Hello. What's going on? Ah, what's going on? You, you can stop now. Stop pretending it's a real meeting. Do you always have real meetings with cakes?

Mita Nathwani: No, we don't. Just for you. These are just for you.

Stuart: You see the thing is, every so often I get to wander around campus to hand out Wows and Wonders because people get nominated for doing amazing, wonderful things. And guess what? Nominated and won a Wow for the amazing work that you do, but have done in particular, the particular thing was working through how to connect when students arrive into that Welcome Week, first experience on the Monday, how to make that join, how to make that connection really work. We have to do two things. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Who's going to collect the award? The star. You are having the star on behalf of the team, but thank you so much. Now you need just somebody just to tell us a little of the journey of thinking from student arrival into Welcome Week.

Laura Mewis: Well, I suppose we did find that there was a bit of a gap over that arrivals weekend. Obviously Welcome is very jam packed full of stuff. And then we found, we obviously look after the students and often, they get here, they might meet some of our staff at the residences, but then they're looking around for stuff to do. That isn't always that option for them to get out, meet new people. We just put together a stage, and we have things like speed friending, so people coming along to meet other people, we included the societies so they could be involved with performing and open that up so students can join societies earlier, and really making students aware of other services.

In addition, Laura Mewis, Residential Community Coordinator, recognised that students often feel isolated at night when many services are closed. She created a QR code to stick in student bedrooms, signposting students to support servicesLink opens in a new window, including teams who are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Laura co-ordinated the content - focusing on what students need support with rather than expecting them to know which service they need to access - and the design, printing, and placement of QR codes in 7,500 rooms. The QR code has been hugely beneficial for students, with an average of 511 individual 'hits' every day.

The team's nominator told us:

on Arrivals weekend:

"The planning work the team put into this event is commendable, from additional security, advertisement both online and social media, ensuring staff coverage for the activities, engaging with departments and SU societies for entertainment/information and completing their day-to-day job at the same time! The difference made to the student experience of Warwick Arrivals has been recognised by stakeholders and I am incredibly proud of their achievements in this."

on the QR code:

"Laura has connected with many departments to ensure the information is accessible, accurate and available for students which has not always been an easy feat. I am immensely proud of the dedication and support that Laura has shown to identifying risk, acting upon this and continuing to seek improvements with the data collected since implementation, despite the multiple challenges faced. An incredible achievement and a potentially life saving innovative creation."

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