What did I do?
In my first year of university, I was hired as a researcher as part of a Student & Staff Partnership Research project with the aim of understanding the student support experience within the School of Informatics. This research carried on until the end of my second year as an undergraduate student.
My responsibilities included assisting in project management, interviewing participants, performing thematic analysis on transcripts, and collaborating with the project lead and team members to create a report on our findings.
We initially had two blog posts [1] [2] published on the Teaching Matters blog at the University of Edinburgh but were additionally successful in submitting our paper to the proceedings of the Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education conference (which had >400 submissions with <27% acceptance rate) in July 2024.
I am eternally grateful for project lead Fiona and team member Ojaswee for the opportunity to create this research together and I am proud to co-author my first academic publication with them.
If you are interested, please view the paper at your pleasure! I have included the abstract below:
Paper Abstract
Over the last two years in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, we have implemented a new approach to student support for our undergraduate and masters students, integrating new approaches to practical support and well-being with a range of co- and extra-curricula events, designed to help computing students develop more completely as future employees and citizens.
In this paper, we outline the new approach, comparing it with our traditional approach to student support in our department, and consider how successful this switch has been through interviews with twenty-six students. Our research indicates that the key things that students value in student support are reliability and consistency, and that whilst engaging computing students in non-core activities is challenging, there are approaches that can help – in particular, being very specific how students will benefit through attending and allowing flexibility in routes to engagement.