Why Warwick video transcript

Welcome

Good morning, welcome to Warwick. It's lovely to see so many of you here. My name's Steven and I've been given just a few minutes to tell you what makes this such an exciting place to live work and study.

Why Warwick? So, we are a young, ambitious and enterprising University. We have a constant desire to challenge convention and to create something new and I think that sets us apart from virtually all of our competitors. So, if you're very bright; you're passionate about your subject and you want to study in a modern progressive campus environment then this could well be the right choice for you.

We are just over 50 years old but I think it's fair to say that we've come a long way in a relatively short space of time. Today we're firmly established as one of the UK's top universities and our reputation extends throughout the world.

We are top 100 in to global rankings as you can see, and reputation is important, but I think it's the experience we can offer you as a Warwick student that goes way beyond any rankings and that's why you're all here today to see our campus; to get a feel for our community and our values and everything you can get involved with as a Warwick student. See if it feels right for you. So this is our campus; it's a close-knit community of staff and students from all over the world and I think there's a real energy to this place and I hope, I hope that you'll pick up on that today when you have a look around.

To that end I would recommend that you go on one of our campus tours who is one of our student ambassadors; they're all waiting for you outside the hall - you see there's a sea of yellow t-shirts - and it really is a fabulous way to see the campus through a student's eyes, so I'd highly recommend that you go on a campus tour today.

Before we do that though I just want to draw your attention to some of the highlights on our campus. Let's begin with socializing because, after all, the campus is a brilliant way, and a brilliant place to make friends.

Social life

We have several restaurants bars and a nightclub on campus or any of you interested in bars and nightclubs, no ok I'll move straight on then, you can always ask our students on the campus tour. We have a tea shop, we have shops, Banks, Post office, Launderettes, basically everything you could need is here on your doorstep.

We're also fortunate to have lots of green space as well so if you just want to get away from it all, perhaps you're preparing for an essay and you need a bit of thinking space, then there's a lots of opportunity to do that too.

Recent developments

Something else you'll notice on our campus are cranes, and that's because our campus is constantly evolving and just want to draw your attention to a couple of really exciting new developments. The first one is our sports and wellness hub, this 50 million pound development which was completed earlier in this year includes a 12 lane swimming pool, 3G sports pitches, a 230 station gym and an enormous climbing wall, let's have a quick look inside.

So if you enjoy your sports that's a really exciting development and I would encourage you to go and have a look at it today, you can jump on one of our shuttle buses or there are guided walks over to the Sports Hub, full details are in your open day guide.

Warwick Arts Centre

Good, so another exciting new development is this very building, the Warwick Arts Centre, it's already one of the biggest venues of its kind outside London, it's a huge venue for live music, drama and comedy. Just looking at some of the listings for the next few weeks we've got the likes of Ben Elton, Romesh Ranganathan and Bastille all playing on this stage. So it's a really exciting thing to have at the centre of our campus and as you’ve probably noticed its being extensively revamped and refurbished at the moment, to create a bigger, better space by the end of 2020. That space will include three cinema screens, two theatres an art gallery as well as this fantastic concert hall, so, it's a great facility to have right here at the heart of our campus.

Accommodation

Now moving on, probably one of the big questions lots of you have is whereabouts will I live when I go to university and I think one of the great benefits of coming to Warwick is that you can live right here, you can live right here on campus for your first year, and that really is a fantastic way to settle in, get to know people and make friends.

We have 6700 study bedrooms to suit all different personalities, different budgets, they have shared kitchen facilities so they're self-catering, so how many of you can cook in this room, good, you can in the front row, now's a good time start learning if you can't.

There's an unusually tidy student bedroom and this is our most recent development, it's the Cryfield Village which has townhouse style apartments and studios and phase one is open now. As I say living on campus fantastic way to settle in but what happens after that, well in your second year it's usually expected that you move off campus and get somewhere to live in the local area, and that brings me on to our location.

Local area

I think we have a fabulous location here at Warwick, on my travels around the country students often ask me where is Warwick, and I say we're in the middle, and the great thing about being in the middle is that we're really well connected, so London is just an hour away by train, Birmingham is very close by as well and just in our local area we have some fabulous towns like Warwick, Kenilworth, Stratford-upon-Avon, lovely towns all steeped in history.

But what about our local city, as some of you may have noticed it's not Warwick, it is of course Coventry, our campus lies just three and a half miles from the centre of Coventry and Coventry is a fabulous thriving city, it has two big universities, students make up 6% of the population, so as you can imagine there's a lot going on and this picture was taken at the Godiva festival which is the largest free family music festival in the country and it takes place every summer in the War Memorial Park not far from our campus.

And as some of you may have noticed in the press Coventry has recently been awarded the title of UK City of Culture 2021, which means there'll be countless really exciting live acts taking place on and off campus during that year when potentially many of you will be students here. So there's never been a more exciting time to be here in Coventry and that's certainly one option for accommodation after your first year, another one that's very popular with Warwick students is Leamington Spa, Leamington spa is a beautiful Regency town full of boutique shops, bars, cafes, very student friendly and many Warwick students see it as a home from home.

So I hope that's given you a flavour of life at the University, but first and foremost you will be here to learn, so here to tell us more about the teaching and learning experience please welcome to the stage, Professor Stuart Croft our Vice Chancellor.

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Stuart Croft, Vice Chancellor

Thank you very much, good morning, welcome to Warwick, it's wonderful to welcome you all here today, as Steven says my moment in front of you this morning is to talk about the education experience here at Warwick. And it really starts with this, that sense of a community, of curiosity, hopefully you have a curiosity about the world, about your subject, about things going on and it is how we work with you to develop that curiosity that is the focus of really what I want to say for the next seven or eight minutes.

Problem-solving

That curiosity we want to work with you in the number of different ways, one is problem solving, so yes you will have here lots of opportunity to think about theoretical work, abstract work, conceptual work, but you'll also have lots of ways of connecting that to real problems in the real world, giving you the sense of how you might have the, the techniques, the tools to think about the problems that you want to see solved, and one of the key ways of doing that is to equip you with critical thinking, not just accepting the way the things have always been talked about, written about, thought about, but finding different ways to challenge, different ways to think about particular problems and particular issues.

And to do all of that in an international context because our curricula are genuinely international, and your experiences here as I shall say a little more later are genuinely international and also an intercultural experience, an opportunity to think from different perspectives about the world and our place within it.

And when we put all that together, what is the purpose, what is the outcome, well there are twomain outcomes here that I think are really important. One, you become really highly sought after by employers and that is important, it gives you opportunities, options for that which you want to do next. But two, and I would say equally important it makes you highly valued by society.

Deep thinking

The way in which and we try to take that forward is to think about this, how you get immersed in deep thinking. All of our schools and departments are disciplinarily excellent, that is their purpose, that is the purpose of being a school or a department in the university like Warwick.

It gives you an opportunity to specialize in particular disciplinary focus if it is that which you want to do, but there are plenty of interdisciplinary options within departments and schools and across departments and schools.

The way in which we try to encourage that immersion is not just through lectures and laboratory sessions and classes, important though they are, it is also to create, to support, to develop that, that community of curiosity.

Students learning together, one of the things we talk a lot about is co-creation, where students and staff work together on issues connected to the curricula, what other materials have people come across, what are they heard about, where they're making a connection in a different disciplinary area, how do we bring that together and encouraging supporting our students to learn together is a really key part of that which we want to do.

Support

Now of course, students are not on their own, there is support, there are support from module tutors and personal tutors, there will be support in the first year with residential life tutors. Each of our departments has senior tutors, those senior tutors are connected together, we're underneath and with working with our dean of students, the role of all of these people is to support the student as an individual and also to support cohorts of students, to work with cohorts of students as well as individuals to how we might respond and react and adapt and evolve the way in which we're working.

There's other elements of support as well of course, we have student staff liaison committees, this is an opportunity for students to be elected on to a committee in their school or department and to sit with academic members of staff and go through sets of issues representing students and student interests.

Facilities

We also have and I'll say a bit more about this later an extensive set of support around employability, how students are encouraged and supported to develop their CV, to develop their thinking about what it is they might want to do after university and to give some guidance, some support, some activities to help progress in those areas as well. One of the key things is developing space to learn, if you think that one of the key things here is not just the lectures, but also giving space and encouragement for students to learn together, what is key is to have flexible, high-quality space in which to learn.

Our Oculus building, which maybe some of you have seen so far, but no doubt during your day here you will see, is a spiritual home of learning on our campus and it has spaces of this sort that students can get together in groups of two or three or four on a particular joint project or thinking about a particular problem or working through some of the issues that have been raised in a recent lecture, or just finding a bit of time and space to be together, to dwell together as well as to learn together.

We've got as Steven said a lot of new investment ongoing, we've opened recently our new mathematical sciences building, the Bhattacharyya building which is our showcase for our collaboration with industry and our way of bringing students together with companies.

We've got our wellness hub, we've got a Faculty of Arts building going up next door, a interdisciplinary bio -medicine research building going up on Gibbet Hill, lots of new developments and the theory, the drive in all of this is not just high quality but creating space for our students to learn within all of those, all those new buildings.

One of the things that I think is also really important in a university such as this, is new thinking, in a sense that's what universities are really all about, they are supposed to be places where new thinking can be developed and tested and adopted or rejected, how do we think about challenges in new and different ways.

Education and research

And for a university such as Warwick this is a really key part of our DNA, we are a charity, as a charity we have to have two - we have to have charitable objects and we have two charitable objects. One is of course around Education and the other is around Research and we take research incredibly seriously.

In the last assessment nationally of research excellence, this university came seventh; we're only 50 years old, there are a number of Universities quite a lot older, quite a lot larger and an opportunity to get quite a long way ahead of us but we're closing those gaps because of that commitment to new and fresh thinking.

Enterprise

At the way in which that connects through to the life of the university is in a variety of different ways, one is supporting students in the space of new thinking as well. We have many students who will start up their own social enterprises, start up their own companies and we provide increasing support through a lot of that work as well but one of the other things that's important is to see how it is that students at undergraduate level can do research themselves.

Undergraduate research

Of course there are projects, there dissertations which may be a core part of the program, it may be a choice that you can take, but we have other ways in which we support undergraduate students to do research so for example, the undergraduate research Support Scheme, is a scheme where students can apply to be funded, to be connected with some of those world leading research groups. Our International Conference on Undergraduate research is a 24 hour round-the-world, video linked opportunity for students to present and discuss their ideas with others, other students from institutions, genuinely globally.

Global university

Now the way in which we want to think about this is really fresh perspectives, this is a global institution, we're globally connected, but that global nature is really manifested here on campus. More than a hundred and fifty nationalities here on campus, the ‘Times Higher’ does an analysis of what they describe as the most international universities in the world and they put three things together to come up with that analysis. The first is the proportion of students who are international, the second the proportion of staff that are international and the third the proportion of scientific published papers that are co-authored with somebody based outside of your home country. It is a measure of who we are and what we do, and in that measure every year Warwick sits in the top 20 in the world, this really is an extraordinary global experience, a global experience here and intercultural experience here, and you have opportunities to take advantage of that, not just on campus but also through placements, through mobility options around the world, and putting all that together gives you the opportunity to really create a fantastic portfolio of knowledge and skills and achievements when it comes to thinking about what you do next.

Employability

Our reputation amongst employers is high, but we're not satisfied with that we've just, 10 days ago, opened our new student opportunities hub which you will probably see if you're walking around the Piazza outside. This is about encouraging and supporting students to think even earlier in their university career about what their real interests are, to things too early in their career about developing that portfolio, there are more than 3,000 opportunities for students to be elected to run clubs, societies, to sit on those student staff layers on committees I mentioned earlier, to develop leadership potential to, develop leadership experience all the sorts of things that employers are looking for

If you look at some of the government data, something called the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes data - you can tell it's a government report can't you - that says that students after five years who graduate from Warwick are amongst the most highly paid of students graduating from university in the country.

But that's not our driver, if that is what you want to do we will support you to get to that end, but if you want to do something different, if you want to work in the public sector, if you want to work in charities, if you want to start your own social enterprise we will support you as well, the key is to work with you early to help find out what it is that you really want to do and you really want to achieve.

Now that's enough for me and from Steven for now, the highlight of your morning is going to be to hear from real people, real students, two real students who are going to tell you exactly how it is, please would you welcome our two students Kasia and Meredith.

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Kasia and Meredith

Hi my name is Kasia and I'm a second-year global sustainable development and life sciences student and Hi I'm Meredith a fourth-year global sustainable development and sociology student and part of the reason I came to Warwick was because of the opportunities that I found out about on one of my open days.

City versus campus

If I were to be entirely honest with you, I always thought of myself as a City University person, I grew up in a capital city and I really didn't imagine myself anywhere else, but I didn't come to like just, like you I came to visit the campus on my offer holder day and I fell in love. I saw a place where I knew that I could flourish because there's so many things going on, your kind of enclosed in this community and there's so many opportunities for you as a student that I didn't see in any of the other universities I applied to and I decided to firm Warwick and make it my first choice.

Flatmates

I was also lucky enough to be part of the first Welcome Week here at Warwick and this was an amazing opportunity for me to meet a lot of people because it was a week dedicated for us just to get to know our flatmates, to get to know our departments, we didn't have any classes you know, it's like we're just thrown into university life and with this week there's so many tasters, there's so many activities I was kind of reassured that the reason I chose Warwick was accurate and like the thing I saw on my offer holder day was actually real and you know this is going to be a great experience for the next three or four years.

Societies

And the thing is that when you live on campus especially in your first year you do have a lot of free time because well there are a lot of classes and a lot of academic things to do, you're so close to them that you know in your free time you're free to do whatever you want and you can decide what to do with that time and in my experience, I decided to join as many societies and get involved in as many things as possible, sorry, and so the first thing I decided to do is to join a sports club and I'm not a very sporty person so I was trying to find something new, something different and I decided to join the cheerleading team and yes it's actually a sport.

We competed at Nationals last year and placed third so it was crazy experience for me to you know go out, wear the team Warwick hoodie, represent my university at a real sports competition and as a first year coming in, getting to do something to get my mind off of studying you know some physical exercise, all the facilities that we have at Warwick, it's a great opportunity and you also get to meet a lot of people in different years and that does come in handy for example when you're in the library 2 a.m. and you're not really sure how to check out a book, so you get a lot of support from them in your first few weeks at university.

So talking of a neutral sports at Warwick I did a very similar thing in my first year and decided to go along to the sports and societies fairs that were held two, three days across the first week, you really get to go and meet different societies see exactly what's on offer and there's a small selection of those at the information fair as well today. But something that I decided to join was underwater hockey and scuba diving, bit of an unusual one, I'd never heard of it before but decided to go along to a taster and then found one of, some of my best friends there at the end of my first year and not only that but it really gave me the opportunity to give back.

As Stuart mentioned as well we have so many opportunities for things like committees, elections run through the SU and also Warwick Sport, so I was able to become training officer in my second year and then social secretary this year, being able to put on different events for all of the different members and welcome people just as I was welcomed in first year.

And not only that but I also joined Quidditch and yes it's the sport from Harry Potter, we do have brooms but we don't fly but once again it just gave me the opportunity to do something that I'd never thought of doing before and that was part of what I was really really interested in was just trying out the new things and making the friends that I didn't think that I would ever make.

Study abroad

When you're at University your development doesn't end when the school year ends, at Warwick we have a lot of opportunities for you to still continue your education throughout the summer and one of these things is the Warwick short term study abroad bursaries. So I love traveling and I've always wanted to go and see Africa, explore the culture, just to get to know the continent I've never been in because of you know financial reasons for example. And I applied for this bursary to be able to volunteer at a health clinic for almost a month last summer, this summer, because of my degree and how it fit into what I'm studying and what I want to do my dissertation on, and the bursary helped me financially to be able to afford to go and explore Ghana, it was a great experience, I learned so much I had an amazing time and I can't wait to hopefully go back as soon as possible.

And it isn't just short-term study abroad opportunities as well that are available, I, now in fourth year, took my last year out to go and study in Canada for a year, I was based in Queen's University in Kingston Ontario and it was one of the most incredible years of my life. There were so many things that I was supported by Warwick to do, for example and as I mentioned earlier with Quidditch, I was able to represent Queens as well on a national level and even just academically being able to talk to my personal tutor back here, just discuss what's going on, talk about fourth year, how I can bring what I've been learning into it, it was all just incredible and then that also gave me the opportunity to be able to go traveling for two months which is something that I never thought I would do alone but I ended up taking a train across Canada from Toronto to Vancouver, travelling around the Rockies and it was just the most amazing time.

Working during your studies

But it's not just on study abroad that you get the support and help from Warwick as well, so student work it's a very big part of life for me as well as I know it would be for a lot of students and the opportunity hub as well as the careers and skill services, and so much more really have given me that support, so not only is this one of the jobs that you're able to take up as a student, but things such as student blogging, working here in the arts centre or one of the many bars and cafes around campus there are so many different opportunities to be able to develop your CV a little bit further and develop skills as well even just through societies.

Enterprise

When you come into University essentially you want to be able to find something to do after you graduate and here at Warwick there's a lot of opportunities to develop yourself professionally and in your career. One night I got a message from one of my friends that someone dropped out from a competition that they're doing this weekend and if I would want to step up and do the Warwick Innovation Hub with Enactus. I thought you know I don't have anything to do this weekend, might be a fun thing to do, get some experience and so we had 24 hours to come up with the social enterprise in that helping refugees and we ended up winning the competition receiving 500 pounds funding and now I'm kind of running a social enterprise which is crazy, can't believe it started with just a text message and we got to apply for more funding from a bunch of different university and outside of university funds, and it's been a crazy experience.

At the same time though I joined the consulting Society and as you can see I ran for Co-head of woman consulting, so like emeritus said, there's a lot of opportunities for you take leadership positions in these societies and that's helping me with my networking, with getting contacts in the industry, which will hopefully help me in the future. And the support that I got from the Society helped me land a spring week at PwC and I got my first kind of professional experience in the business world, which was a lot of fun and certainly something I'll consider doing after graduation.

So that's just two of 25,000 stories here at Warwick - and now it's time to go out and make your own.

Thank you.