This year the Dean took on seven EP students for an exciting and valuable work placement! The EP Team spoke to Tracey Bello, Internationalisation Officer, about the experience.
Dr Anthony Manning, Dean for Internationalisation, and Tracey Bello, Internationalisation Officer and PA to Dr Manning, have long been supporting the Employability Points Scheme and this year was no exception. Generously taking on seven EP students, Dr Manning and Tracey put together a team to create the ‘Kent Global Connect‘ project – a conversion tool to help students feel confident and gain additional knowledge about starting their studies at Kent. Attendees were applicants and offer holders.
“The students took the lead in arranging the speaker as well as completing template slides appropriately for the presentations. These sessions were aimed at applicants and offer holders and were a great success. Overall, we had over 800 attendees and received some very positive feedback.”
Tracey explained how well the students worked together as a team despite the challenges of remote working, twice weekly meetings and a Teams chat helped ensure this would happen.
“The way that the students presented at the online sessions was great. Even those who were a little lacking in confidence, grew over the 4 week period and each student was given a turn at preparing and speaking. They also answered questions in the chat box during the sessions.”
The KGC sessions were so popular and received such good feedback that Tracey and Dr Manning have decided to run another two in September.
Overall, Tracey had this to say about EP:
“It’s a great way to give students some excellent work experience and employability skills and it is rewarding to see them grow with the responsibilities and opportunities they are presented with. For us too, it was great to have student input and a student led set of sessions as this proved popular when talking to prospective Kent students.”