Hello again from Caitlin and Nancy!

As you’ll see from the new layout of the website, it’s been a week of big changes! Claire of the Ethnographic Encounters project, who also happens to be a WordPress wizard, sat down with us this week to teach us all about website redesign. Although we’re still in the process of reworking the website, we hope you like the new look and will continue to enjoy the changes we’ll be making and the content we’ll be adding. If you’re interested in having your profile added to our Network page, then please do send us an email at intercultural@soton.ac.uk.

We also had a meeting this week with the University of Southampton’s International Office, which proved to be very insightful. We’re hoping that we can collaborate with Maddy, Maddie and Fraser from the IO team when terms begins to enhance the international experience of students at Southampton.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve also started recruiting volunteers for the WOW Festival this week, and should you be interested in participating, you can register using this sign-up sheet: http://goo.gl/forms/mFa4cSEFKa. We’re looking for volunteers to join our organising team, marketing team and helpers on the day, so if you’d like to be involved, then please do get in touch!

We’ll be updating the website further next week, and, as always, will post another Intern Update on Friday!

Hello again from Caitlin and Nancy!

Now that we’re really into the swing of our internship the days are passing so quickly- we can hardly believe that today marks the half way point of Caitlin’s placement with LLAS! As we’ve only six weeks to go until the deadline to have all of the ICS Festival signed and sealed (it won’t be delivered until February!), this week we presented our final festival plans to the rest of the LLAS team and interns. It’s great to know that despite our supervisor, Ali, being away for a while, we’ve still got lots of support from the rest of the staff and interns, although we know that Ali is only an email and an iPad away. We’ve also moved up to the LLAS offices this week and so we’re already collaborating with one of the Routes Into Languages interns, Yolanda, who has drawn up some fantastic designs for our festival logo.

Once again this week we spent our Monday evening in the company of Friends International and enjoyed an excellent talk on Southampton in World Affairs. We also crossed paths with a few of the students on the EAS course, currently studying here in Southampton away from their homes in Kazakhstan, and chatted about plans to get some conversation clubs established so as to permit the students to practice their English. Hopefully we can get something up and running before the end of the summer!

We gained even more insight into internationalisation activities running in Southampton through sharing coffee and biscuits with the International Women’s Club this Wednesday. We’d like to thank the ladies for being so welcoming to us, listening about our work placements and sharing their own stories with us. We’ll certainly be back once the Autumn programme starts next month!

See you back here next Friday for another Intern Update!