Yuemiao Ma

This blog is part of the completion of the Work Experience Edinburgh Award

Overview of my work experience

I joined the University’s Academic Services Department as a Building Communities Intern. My focus has been on Postgraduate Research (PGR) students to investigate the landscape of community building and develop a sense of “what works”. Having a particular focus on PGR students is because they are often positioned in a blurred place between students and staff, and some students might struggle to feel part of a research group or community. My main tasks include progressing project recommendations from last year’s interns, assisting with gathering and sharing good practice examples, and analysing student feedback and cases. Together with another intern, we aim to create a few outputs, such as an updated evaluation plan for community building, and a few case studies that have been worked on. At the end of my internship, I created one blog post summarising my work, one report including 4 case studies, one piece of reflection about an initiative plan, and also delivered one presentation at a national conference.

Describe my own journey for each of the three development goals.

At the beginning of the Edinburgh Award, I chose three skills to develop throughout the internship, and I will reflect on my journey in developing them respectively.

Communication skills – seeking feedback

In the beginning, I felt I was able to evaluate feedback, but I was not good at asking for feedback as I’m always an introverted person. I started by using the weekly meetings with my line manager to ask about my performance and how I can improve. If there is written work that I’ve done, I would send it to them beforehand and prepare some questions such as ‘what do you think of the structure’ or ‘is my wording appropriate’. I have gradually developed this skill and built a stronger relationship with my manager. I also realised I need to utilise the opportunity to network with other people I’ve met and seek feedback from them. For example, after the presentation at the conference, some people asked questions about my work, and I would chase them afterwards to see if they can give more feedback or have other comments on the presentation. To me, asking for feedback is more difficult than other communication skills as it combines oral/written communication, listening carefully and putting the feedback into real action. My development in this skill is that I am more confident now to critically reflect on my work and seek feedback when I need it.

Personal Autonomy Skills - Using Initiative

During my internship, I tried to implement a roundtable for PGR students to share their experiences in a safe environment and meet people from different Schools. To achieve this initiative, I have created a plan, had a trial and gathered some feedback afterwards from the participants to form some reflections. I have done some initial research online and sought suggestions from the Students Association about organising student events. It was meaningful to have the opportunity to run a trial, which let me discover some detailed aspects that I could have improved, such as making clearer the time and venue on advertisements, setting more precise instructions, etc. It is like a pilot study for a piece of research. My biggest learning from this experience is that the goal should be realistic, and not aim to achieve everything in a limited amount of time. When trying to implement an initiative, it is quite often that new problems would emerge which might discourage us to proceed, but these are all learning processes and there is nothing to be achieved without a try.

Research & Enquiry skill - Finding solutions

Finding the right solutions needs us to understand the context correctly. My internship has a broader aim of ‘building community for PGR students’, but this is quite a big topic and I need to find out the real cause of the problem, and break it down into smaller, measurable solutions. During my internship, I realised that there are a lot of efforts around the university to build a more resilient learning community, but the real problem is a lack of transparent and effective communication. For example, there are good examples from some Schools, but they are not available to other Schools. I then talked to my managers about gathering and sharing of these good practices. I also evaluated a few channels where we could share, and we finally chose to use blog posts and University webpages. These two channels are both internal and external facing, so they help exhibit the University’s work to a wider audience. Sometimes there are multiple solutions to a problem and it is often the case that each solution can be justifiable based on different perspectives, but it is still important to have an open mind in the beginning.

What positive impact have I made?

Regarding positive impacts, I started talking to my managers about what kinds of output I could deliver at the beginning of my internship, which can be spread to a wider audience. They have given me a few suggestions such as creating podcasts, blog posts, a resource bank, etc. During my internship, I reached out to a few other departments in internal and external meetings and received their advice.

As one of the aims of my internship is to help good experience sharing, we decided to collaborate with a University-wide blog site to create a theme to post blogs about community-building cases. I contacted staff and students from various Schools to invite them to write blog posts about their experiences. Some people were very glad to be invited and confirmed their interest in writing a blog. Some others responded that they were keen on this but did not have much time to write, so I said I could have a quick chat with them and form the blog based on our discussion. This not only provides a platform for people to share good experiences and learn from each other, but also to have opportunities to reflect on the progress they’ve made, and what they can improve next.

During one chat with a student group, they started their online community building during the COVID-19 pandemic when everything was happening online, but now as things are going back to ‘normal’ and there are more chances to meet in person, they were discussing that things needed to change. I also put these reflections in my internship report, which could be seen by more people. All the people I talked to have given me quite positive responses about the opportunity to chat over their project, and would be interested to see what others are doing. My managers also said in my internship report that they were impressed by my willingness and ability to critically reflect on my work and the discussions I have had with others. They were glad that I can identify some of the impacts of my work not only for the University and the project, but also on my own experience as a PGR student at UoE.

Thoughts on the future (now and beyond university)

Now my internship is over and it’s time to have an overall reflection and look into the future. I have gained some new understandings of community building during these several months – it is not a ‘bottom-up’ nor ‘top-down’ approach, in which only a small portion of people (like student representatives, students support offices) are making efforts to plan activities and inviting people to come. It should be a collaborative approach among all staff and students, and it is crucial to have staff members engaged in the process. For PGR students, their first points of contact are supervisors, programme directors, or personal tutors, and more efforts from them could help students build a sense of belonging, and feel they are valued and recognised. These reflections are very significant to me as my PhD research is about active citizenship, in which community building is an important concept. Even though I haven’t decided whether to stay in academia or not after PhD (there are still a few years to go anyway), I think the skills I gained from this internship and the Edinburgh Award process, such as reflection, communication, and problem-solving, would be beneficial for any kinds of work I will do in the future.