First to Second Year Transitions

Staff Involvement:

• Project Lead- management of the Project Officer, and supporting student co-creators
  • Approximately 70% of time was spent at the start of the project, of which 40% was management of students
  • As the project developed, this reduced to about 60%, with 20-30% of time managing students
• Project Officer (University of Warwick graduate)- main contact for student co-creators
  • Approximately 20-30% of time spent managing and guiding student co-creators
  • About 5% of the above leasing with student project lead (who helped manage and guide student co-creators)

Students:

All student involvement was recruited through a communications campaign that distributed advertisements for both the workshops and the co-creation positions through departmental newsletters, student communications newsletter, digital screen images, inclusion in SU newsletter, out to societies and through sharing on social media (where accounts existed).

• Student co-creators x9 (1 lead, 8 additional students) see working with students tab for details
• Student workshop attendees (Maximum x5 in each workshop)
  • 2 hours in length:
    • First part (approximately 1.5 hours) dedicated to understanding their experience of the first to second year transitions (or for first years, what they were anticipating)
    • Second half (approximately 0.5 hours) to what a good solution would look and feel like to them
  • Remuneration: £25 Love2Shop Thank you Voucher
  • Support:
    
    • Signposted to Report and Support and University Wellbeing pages at start of workshop
    • Shared questionnaires before and after workshops, to capture anything they feel may have been missed as part of the workshops

Key Objectives

• Understand where students are seeing barriers and struggling when moving from first to second year
  • Hopefully grow understanding of the different struggles of certain user groups within this (disabled, neurodivergent, Widening Participation students etc)
• Based on student need- prioritise next steps to help address some of those issues
• Increase student satisfaction and wellbeing

• Influence teams to consider internal transitions as a key part of the student journey

Key Outcomes

Wepbage for the project contains a 'you said we did', broadly we:

• Living off-campus webpage creation
• Dedicated events:
  • Finance Fair (renamed Money Fest)
  • Local Area Tours (Coventry and Earlsdon)
  • Living Interculturally Training
• Additional content on interactive map: food storage and re-heating areas (still in progress)
• Influenced the inclusion of internal transitions in the Education and Student Experience Strategy

Student workers

Recruitment: All student involvement was recruited through a communications campaign that distributed advertisements for both the workshops and the co-creation positions through departmental newsletters, student communications newsletter, digital screen images, inclusion in SU newsletter, out to societies and through sharing on social media (where accounts existed).

Induction: ran by Project lead, spread out over first 2 weeks- 2 introductory sessions to talk through the role, systems used and general training, a 2.5hr focus group training session

Post type: Non-recurring, students were hired as a one-off to help with the project, however when student help was needed in subsequent work this was recruited first from the student co-creators.
 
Personal Development Support:

• Weekly Reflections- designed to help students identify skills they've achieved and what they would like to work on
• LinkedIn session- to help students identify how to showcase skills through the platform
• Invitation to support and participate in different university conferences and workshops