Hello from James
Hi everyone, Following the three previous posts, I thought I would follow suit and use my first contribution to this blog to introduce myself and discuss my role in the development of the Humanities Employability Module to be rolled out to first year students in October. My name is James Tribe and I am about to enter my 4th and final year of study as a German and Spanish student here at the University of Southampton. Much like Amber, I have recently returned from my Year Abroad, which, incidentally, is an incredible opportunity offered by the University that I would recommend to anybody who has a chance to participate as a part of their degree course, whether a language student or not! I spent 9 incredible months living in Castellón de la Plana on the east coast of Spain and, having returned in June and spent a few weeks culturally readjusting to normal life in England, (spending time in crowded and typically British local bars watching England crash out of the World Cup went a long way in this respect!), I jumped straight into this internship, working with Eleanor and alongside Amber to try and improve the employability strategy of the Faculty of Humanities through the creation of this compulsory first year module. This project greatly interested me personally as I felt that I myself had not considered my own skills development, employability and future career enough during my first few years at University. I believe that, for this reason, I was hugely motivated to get involved with this opportunity to aid future Humanities students in being more actively engaged from day one in truly making the most out of their years at university, improving their employability in the process and being aware of their own development throughout their degree. As Amber touched upon, I began by carrying out external research, primarily on our fellow Russell Group universities, in order to compare what they offer in terms of employability activity with that which we currently offer here at the University of Southampton. Through this research I was able to identify areas of good practice among our Russell Group comparators, which may be of interest to us in the ongoing development of the module, as well as highlight nationwide trends concerning the issue of employability in higher education which I will discuss in more detail in my next blog entry. Following this research, we have spent the last week or so making great progress as far as the module itself is concerned, much of which I also plan to outline in my next blog entry. We have also been able to gather the opinions of several of the Employability Tutors of each department within Humanities regarding how we could tailor the module to each subject’s individual needs. This potential customisation of the generic module is an aspect of the project which has already raised some very interesting points that myself and Amber will be looking to feedback to Career Destinations in the next few weeks as we commence work with them on the module content and structure itself. That is all I will say for now. In my next entry I will look to go into more detail about the aims and foci of our module and the reasons behind this, as well as discussing my ever-increasing role in the marketing of the module and the related creation of the ‘Mission Employable’ brand which myself, Amber, Charlotte and Verity are all looking to ultimately turn into a faculty-wide movement!