Fiona Wilkie, Nick Grindle, Argyris Karapitsanis (contributions from Abbie King; UCL Arena Centre)
10 minute talk
This presentation will share how Connected Learning Internships were created to address two major challenges as a result of the pandemic: summer internship cancellations for students, and a huge workload for staff faced with moving their teaching online, including induction and co-curricular activities.
The collaboration between UCL Careers and the staff/student partnership (ChangeMakers) team in UCL Arena Centre helped to shape the role into one that was valuable for staff and helped students to develop and articulate employability skills, but also began to foster partnership work between staff and students.
The presentation will discuss data from our evaluation activity (surveys, student focus groups and staff interviews) to think about the future of the internships – which have continued into 2020/21 – looking at both the potential to involve students in other areas of the University and also how it fits in with our other staff/student partnership activity.