ResLife News – January 2024

Happy New Year and welcome to ResLife!

The January blues may be kicking in for some but we’re happy to be back and can’t wait to welcome everyone to our upcoming events. If you’ve not already heard of us, we’re the ResLife team and we organise events, activities and excursions for students at Kent. You can find out all about us and view the range of upcoming events we have planned. Spot our ResLife whiteboards located within the Canterbury campus receptions for a weekly overview or use the Home at Halls app to stay up to date and register for events. (Medway students interested in attending an event can email rlateam@kent.ac.uk).

Sounds good, right?

Round up

Last term we ran a wide range of events with something for everyone. These included tasting events – the chocolate tasting was a particular winner, where we all learnt the intricate and difficult art of analysing chocolate and the many different flavours encompassed within each type of chocolate. We also ran delightful cheese-tasting and hot chocolate events, which we are planning to do many more of to get us through the cold winter period!

To offset our tasting events, promote some health and wellbeing activities and making use of your free Kent Sport membership, we also had a lot of fun with Kent Sport, launching the first-ever ResLife Sports Cup! Here teams from all the campus colleges compete for the Cup trophy in sports and activities such as volleyball, netball, a quiz and ‘The Cube’. With only two events played so far, there is still much to play for!

As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also hosted scavenger hunts, quizzes, “meet the ponies”, board game nights, escape rooms and murder mysteries.

Phew, it’s a wonder we have any energy left for 2024! We won’t stop there though, our arts and crafts events proved especially popular last term, decorating everything from mugs and glasses to cookies.

Top left: students attending a cooking class, top right: students out walking in the woods, bottom left: student holding nerf guns at an escape room event.

2024

We always pay close attention to students’ requests and have enjoyed spending the winter break taking on your feedback to organise many wonderful events for the upcoming term and the rest of this academic year.

This term we have a wide variety of fun and exciting events to look forward to, including Olive Oil and Vinegar tasting for the foodies out there, bowl painting and plushie making for those artistic people, and visits to Wildwood Wildlife Park and nature walks for the outdoorsy types. That’s not all…make space in your calendar, because we’ve also planned a variety of social events, from board games, cooking classes, sports competitions and movie nights. As you might have gathered by now, we don’t do things half-heartedly, which is why we are especially excited to launch our Bunny Book Club, where we will discuss our favourite authors and get to spend time with some real life rabbits.

All of these events, and more, can be found on Home at Halls and on the ResLife calendar. With all these amazing activities planned, make sure you sign up ahead of time as space is limited and demand is high. If you sadly cannot attend, please make sure to unregister so the space can be opened up to others.

The ResLife Team posing for a photo

Stay in touch

We know you’ll want to stay up to date with the things we have planned, so check back in with our monthly blog update, bookmark our webpage, check in with Home at Halls and make sure to follow us on social media. Although we’re currently posting from the Accommodation Facebook page, we’ll soon be launching our own Instagram page, so watch this space for more information.

If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions please contact us via rlateam@kent.ac.uk, website or social media or speak with your friendly ResLife ambassadors at our events or around campus.

Thank you so much to all the students last term who joined us, we can’t wait to welcome you back!