Line Manager Name: Vics Brown
Job Title: Residence Life Manager
Pathways Programme: Pathways to Marketing
Organisation Summary:
The Residence Life Team are part of Wellbeing services, here to support students living in university residences. We help settle in and feel at home in Exeter, with information about living in halls and help if things are difficult.
We are a friendly contact at university that knows everything you need to know.
We run events and trips for you to get to know other students and explore Exeter and the surrounding areas and help when things are difficult, for example flat conflict.
We share information via @exeterreslife – packed full of information about Residence Life events and what’s on in the community. We can recommend places to go, things to do, and how to make the most out of your time here in Exeter. We are an informal, friendly team.
How was your experience of hosting a Pathways intern?
Anjana mostly came into work except for when she was getting footage for us. I was happy to be flexible for more to be hybrid, but this suited her and actually worked for us too. One of the challenges for us as wellbeing is that we could not have her in our normal office as conversations with and about student wellbeing happen all the time so that would not be appropriate for confidentiality reasons. To get around that, we set up a kind of ‘pop up’ comms office where we based ourselves for the week. This actually worked really well as we got more marketing and comms focussed work done as we were not distracted by other tasks.
Given the Professional Pathways internship is 35 hours in total, how would you recommend ensuring both you and your intern gain as much as possible from the experience?
We arranged a meet up with our intern before they started so they felt comfortable and we could know more about their skills and experience which fed into a plan for the time (we spread this over 2 weeks to allow for visa work restrictions). We blocked out our time to focus on work and be available for them and planned tasks to achieve during the week that built on skills and experience. We would review at the end of each day and plan for the next day. Our plan was a mix of tasks we were keen to get done and looking at things that our intern had not done before, which in our case was Capcut video creation to gain new skills as well as experience from this time.
Would you recommend hosting an intern via Professional Pathways?
I would absolutely recommend hosting an intern because of what both parties can get out of it. It feels good to be able to create an opportunity for someone to learn and develop their skills and experience which can directly help them go into their chosen career. You also benefit with someone to help get tasks done, with valuable insight from their unique perspective. They may come with skills and experience that you do not have that can help your work. Best is that this additional resource does not cost you anything, but some of your time and attention. We have had interns for a few years now and they have all been wonderful.