Campus Interns of the Year
Posted on 23 February 2021
Over the last summer, 31 students at the University undertook a series of virtual internship projects with a range of internal departments. After receiving a number of high quality final reports and some difficult deliberations, the Careers and Placements team are delighted to jointly award Emily Patterson and Faye Singleton "Campus Intern of the Year". Read more about their internship projects below.
Emily Patterson, a second year Interactive Media student, worked part-time for eight weeks as a Digital Events Developer for the Department of Biology.
Over the course of her internship, Emily designed and created an online puzzle escape room. Her role involved working virtually to review the departments existing outreach activities, undertaking market research on other university resources for biology courses, completing a stakeholder analysis and using these insights to inform the concept, story design and game mechanics of the final escape room.
The overall aim of the project was to increase prospective student outreach and improve engagement with the department through new online resources.
As part of her final reflections, Emily said:
"The escape room offers an incredibly engaging and unique resource for prospective students and is specifically designed to be as accessible as possible, not only in terms of being digitally accessible but also accessible to international students. As an international student, my perspective became increasingly valuable in identifying important information that prospective students would find useful, as well as create an escape room that would be culturally friendly."
Between 25 August and 31 October 2020, the escape room gained 1015 unique visitors from all over the world, including the UK, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Germany.
Her internship supervisor, Dr. Amanda Barnes from the Department of Biology said "Emily was extremely enthusiastic and passionate whilst creating a virtual escape room during her internship in the Biology department. She was a pleasure to work with. She brought creativity, imagination and a thorough understanding of the target audience to the project. The escape room will be a lasting asset to the department and a very unique recruitment tool to engage prospective students who are unable to visit the department."
Faye Singleton, a second year Biomedical Science student, worked full time for 10 weeks as a Social Media Intern with the Corporate Content Team within Marketing, Recruitment, Admissions and Outreach (MRAO).
The focus of Faye's internship was to review the current offer holder social media channels at the University and come up with a strategy to promote the student voice more across social media channels for 2020/21 to help maximise potential student conversion and recruitment.
Over the course of 10 weeks, Faye was able to complete a SWOT analysis of the existing channels, undertake a comprehensive review of competitor social media channels at other universities and make recommendations for improvements and new content.
Some of the key tasks falling out of this involved creating an interactive campus tour, hosting a live Q&A on results day, creating a student vlogging channel on the University's YouTube pages, developing new graphics for the channel and sourcing and developing engaging student led content to be posted across all mediums. Most notably, Faye successfully increased engagement with the University's TikTok account by more than 900% with fun and engaging new content.
Faye's internship supervisor, Rebecca Tivey said, "Faye's social media expertise and video skills supported the integration of social media into our recruitment strategy. Her positivity and willingness to get involved with ongoing projects and tasks made a huge difference to our team's daily workload. From commissioning original student content and assisting on film shoots, to presenting her findings to senior management, no challenge was too great. Faye has a bright future ahead!"
Both winners were awarded £100 and sent a certificate to recognise their achievements.
This story was originally published by the Student Internship Bureau and is reproduced with their permission.