Hello from Dr Eleanor Quince
Hello all,
My name is Dr Eleanor Quince and I am a lecturer in the History department, Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton. I also have responsibility for the Faculty’s Employability Strategy, working across our seven academic disciplines, in my role as Humanities’ Director of Employability.
This summer I am fortunate to have four amazing student interns working with me to help develop aspects of our employability activity for the next academic year. The interns have been hired through the University’s extremely competitive Excel Placement Scheme. The students applied for their roles just after the Easter break and went through a rigorous process of assessment and interview. Those who made it through are: Amber Dudley and James Tribe, working as Educational Development Officers to plan our new employability module; Verity Smith, our Buddy Scheme Coordinator, setting up a Peer Mentoring programme for the Faculty; and Charlotte Medland, a third Educational Development Officer, concentrating on how we help our students to make the most of group work activities during their time with us. Amber, James, Verity and Charlotte will explain a little bit more about themselves, their roles and their activities in their regular posts on this, our Mission Employable Blog. I am going to use my blog post to tell you a little bit more about what I hope we will achieve through our summer activity and why I have chosen to use student interns to tackle this work.
My remit as Director of Employability is, broadly, to develop strategies to help our students make the most of the opportunities they have for personal and professional development within, alongside and outside of their degree programme. My goal over the summer is to link together all aspects of employability-related activity for Humanities’ students, providing a framework which enables them to take ownership of their future from the very start of their studies. This will be achieved through the creation of a module, by the embedding of employability awareness into our support systems, such as our new Peer Mentoring Scheme, and through the establishment of an External Advisory Board and a VIP Alumni scheme to provide us with a range of different views on how we take this work forward. So, why student interns? Well, I decided that in order to create something which would really speak to our students, the best people to kick-start this new development were our students themselves.
Two weeks into the summer we held our on-campus Away Day where each of the interns presented their work to date. Not only had they achieved a huge amount in a very short space of time, but their enthusiasm, constant flow of bright ideas and inspired insights made me think that not only we will achieve our goal, we’ll exceed it. So, we are on a mission to help our students develop their skills and become more employable and you can follow our progress through this, our Mission Employable Blog. Enjoy!