Hello from Amber

Hello everyone!

My name is Amber Dudley. I am a student of French at the University of Southampton and I have recently returned to the UK after having spent 9 months living, studying and working in Bordeaux, France as part of my third year abroad.

This summer, I’m working as an intern within the Faculty of Humanities under the supervision of Dr Eleanor Quince. Along with my colleague James Tribe (who you’ll be hearing from soon!) I am developing an Employability module. This module will be tailored specifically to first-year Humanities students and aims to help students understand the importance of employability from the moment they arrive at the University. In order to achieve this, we intend to provide students with the tools and resources that will facilitate their understanding and development of the skills that employers are looking for and how they can expand and market these skills to attain their ideal career.

One of the best things about this internship is that I’ll be working closely with three other interns: James, Verity and Charlotte. If you want to find out more about them, have a quick look at their introductory posts!

At first James and I were a bit overwhelmed at the fact that we would be developing an entire module, especially one that will be used by our fellow students! However, after our first meeting with our supervisor, Dr Eleanor Quince, our fears quickly evaporated.

It’s strange to think that we’ve nearly finished our third week of this 12-week project. We have already achieved quite a lot in such a short amount of time! During our first two weeks, James and I spent a lot of time researching higher education initiatives designed with employability in mind. James concentrated mainly on external research, while I focused on existing programmes at the University of Southampton. It was fascinating to learn more about what the University offers to students to help them develop their employability skills. I was hugely impressed by the amount of resources that Career Destinations has to offer, and wish I had made more use of these resources during my first years at University! It was also interesting to see what the other departments were up to, especially Electronics and Computer Science who offer a phenomenal amount of support to their students to improve their future employability prospects.
I think that’s all from me for now; log in tomorrow to find out more from another member of ‘Mission Employable’! Next up on the agenda is our first away day as a team!