My On-Campus Internship Celebration Experience

Elgan Hughes, Student Engagement Manager Learning and Teaching Academy reflects on the recent On-Campus Internships Poster Exhibition.

In the Learning and Teaching Academy, we are dedicated to forging partnerships with our students, empowering students to contribute to our high-quality research and enabling the student voice to directly influence our learning and teaching practices.

On Thursday 13 November, more than 100 research posters adorned the Centre for Student Life, created by this year’s cohort of talented student interns from the 2024 On-campus Internships scheme. The interns were joined by their supervisors, as well as the wider student and staff population to present their research, reflect on their achievements and celebrate their successes over the summer of 2024. The celebration event was an opportunity for staff and students to delve a bit deeper into each other’s experiences and to find out about the various projects.

At this year’s exhibition I was delighted to introduce the lightning talks at the on-campus internship celebration experience. The event highlighted what great things can be achieved through collaborations between staff and students and through partnerships across universities and businesses. The lightning talks opened a dialogue with students, and have shown how the internship scheme can support students to transition into a higher education environment, forge relationships between staff and students, provide students with an insight into post graduate study and influence their future career aspirations.

I heard about how the projects empowered their studies, provoked cross discipline discussion and provided new skills to students, which sets them up for future successes within their own studies. This can only strengthen their experience when looking for opportunities after completing their studies with us.

Feedback

Here is what some student participants had to say about their experience of taking part in the scheme:

‘Having this opportunity to gain incredibly real-world experience of what that’s like has been a massive, massive confidence builder for me.’

‘I think it was really interesting to see how those two different teams and different schools and different fields can come together to work on one singular piece of research that can help inform change for everyone.’

The staff who were involved in this year’s theme also shared their feedback:

‘The On-campus Internships is hugely important to this research. As an Early Career Researcher establishing a research agenda and profile, the work that students do helps to support innovation in research which would be more difficult to make happen otherwise.’

‘An excellent scheme all round and the envy of peers in other universities. For me this further cemented the collaboration I have developed with Ulster University and allowed us to take the discussion of joint work further.’

Thank you

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the supervisors and schools for the time they invest in hosting a placement over the summer. It is truly brilliant that our staff are passionate about the student experience and seek out opportunities to host a placement. I also want to thank our students for putting themselves forward for these opportunities and for investing so much of their effort into making the projects a success – the celebration event was a time to celebrate what you have achieved.

I wish you all the best of luck this year and hope the experience you gained this summer will serve you well in your studies and beyond.

If you missed the event, staff and students can view some of our posters and the lightning talks from the event here. To learn more about the scheme, take a look at our blogs and intranet pages.

We are delighted that the call for staff to apply to get involved in the 2025 programme has now opened, and all the information is available on the On-Campus Internships page on the staff intranet.

Diolch yn fawr.