institute of health informatics

At UCL IHI, the PhD students have a tradition of playing the games’ hangman’ and ‘I spy’ on the kitchen whiteboards, so we decided to continue this tradition and expand our audience by using Twitter as the game platform. We photographed areas around the UCL Campus and London to evoke a sense of community and nostalgia to increase our post-engagement. The games were a big success resulting in the UCL_IHI twitter getting an overall boost of 3711% in tweet impressions, 469% increase in profile visits, and 705% increase in mentions! We then launched the ‘Many Faces of UCL’ interview series to increase opportunities for interactions between students and staff, especially those new to the IHI. We interviewed 8 individuals from IHI, including students and staff, to share their experience working at IHI and their advice for prospective students. Over the 7 days, we received 14K impressions on the tweets, with a sharp increase in engagement rate. These interviews will soon be posted on the UCL IHI website for all to see. The UCL Changemakers funding allowed us to rebuild a sense of community at the IHI through our projects, and it has been a very fulfilling experience.

If someone has an idea that can help improve the UCL community on any front, academic or social, I believe they should pitch their project to UCL Changemakers. I would advise keeping the project as feasible as possible, as even the seemingly small projects, like my Twitter game, can have a big payoff. I received a lot of constructive feedback from the UCL Changemakers team during the development of our project, which eventually helped in the project’s execution. As a first-year PhD student, the UCL Changemakers project was a fantastic opportunity to connect with many people in my department, so I highly recommend others to go for it too!