Student-Staff Partnerships: A Student Partner Intern’s Experience
My name is Eva Shelmerdine and this summer I had the opportunity to work as a student partner intern at the University of Manchester. In this role, I worked alongside staff on a project examining current partnership practice at the University of Manchester. The project also aimed to promote staff-student partnerships and support inclusion of such partnerships in future projects throughout the University. In this blog post, I will talk about and reflect on my experiences in this role.
During my third year of University, I had been the student representative for my course and thoroughly enjoyed working with staff to improve the student experience. When the role of student partner intern was advertised, I saw this as an opportunity to continue to work with staff while gaining further work experience that would boost my CV. The added motivation of an extra source of income was also influential in my decision to apply. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the University continued to support the student partner intern programme and following the submission of a pretty poor-quality application video and a Zoom interview I was given the role as student partner intern!
I was assigned to a project led by Teaching Fellow John Owen, that aimed to examine current partnership practice at the University of Manchester. For my first few weeks in this role, I was simply trying to find my feet — completing online training modules, adjusting to an online working environment and reading up on partnership practice. These weeks were by far the most important in my time as a student partner intern! Having never worked in any kind of office environment, I found it somewhat difficult to adjust to this alien working world. The COVID-19 pandemic further complicated matters requiring me to learn all about Zoom, Slack and other software crucial to maintaining contact with my team. With the support of John and several somewhat confused Google searches, I eventually got my head around things!
From my first few weeks, there are some key reflections to be had. For most students coming into any kind of partnership role, it will be their first experience of an office working environment. Because of this, they may lack confidence and skills that are so crucial in this working world. The support of staff and reassurances that they are always available should I have any questions helped me grow in confidence throughout my time on the team. This confidence allowed me to be a more active member of the project team by enabling me to voice my opinions and ideas in meetings.
I realised I knew nothing about how higher education works ‘behind-the-scenes’ and certainly knew very little about the theory underlying student-staff partnerships. My background reading in the first couple of weeks helped me make sense of these complicated subjects. Without that reading, I would have been completely lost throughout the remainder of my time as a student partner intern.
After a few weeks, I moved onto my first major role within the project — assisting in the design of a staff focussed survey to gather information about current partnership practice at the University. Through this, I gained many new skills including the ability to use the survey design tool ‘Online Surveys’. Crucially, I also developed my reflective skills. In the process of designing the survey, there were multiple points where myself and the team had to review our own work. By reviewing our work and making changes, I was able to develop my critical thinking skills and my ability to reflect on my own work to improve it going forward. Sending the survey out and dealing with some of the inevitable criticism has also developed my resilience and ability to take criticism and turn it into an opportunity to improve in the future.
My second major role within the project was helping to design a workshop for staff to support partnership practice within the university. In this role, I spent less time designing and more time reviewing the designs my team had developed. Providing feedback to staff and seeing how they took this onboard and directly made changes to the workshop design helped build my confidence and feel like an equal, respected member of the team. So often as a student you have an “us and them” mentality when it comes to staff with them holding all the power in any interactions you have with them (after all, they are usually the ones assessing you). Feeling equal to staff members helped build my confidence in my role which in turn allowed me to develop my critical thinking skills freely with no fear of being rejected. In the end, the workshop was a success! I found seeing a workshop I had worked on being so successful was incredibly rewarding.
Now my time as a student partner intern is coming to an end. Though I am sorry to be leaving this role, I am happy to step back to allow another student partner intern to take my place and have this brilliant opportunity to learn and develop! Going forward, I am certain the skills gained in this role will be of great use to me in future employment as well as a welcome boost to my CV. To any students considering whether or not to take an opportunity to work in partnership with staff, I say do it! The skills learnt in this role cannot be taught in lectures and will be hugely useful to you going forward. It is also an incredibly rewarding experience as you are actively involved in improving the student experience and breaking down the walls that so often separate us from the ‘behind the scenes’ world staff so often seem to inhabit.
