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'Welcome to UCL' app launched

21 August 2018

As part of ongoing enhancements to student inductions across UCL, Student Support and Wellbeing have launched a 'Welcome to UCL' app to help new arrivals settle in and organise their first few weeks.

'Welcome to UCL' app launched

Each September, UCL welcomes more than 20,000 new students to our academic community. Over the course of their first few weeks, these students attend a wide range of orientation and welcome events delivered by faculty, department and programme staff, alongside those organised by central teams such as Student Support and Wellbeing, Accommodation and Students' Union UCL.

Given the scale of this operation and of UCL itself, it is no surprise that many students find it a challenge to navigate the campus and to organise their busy induction schedules, despite the best efforts of the hundreds of hardworking staff members involved in the process.

To give students a helping hand at arrival, UCL Student Support and Wellbeing have developed a new app, 'Welcome to UCL'.

Created using the app development platform Guidebook, 'Welcome to UCL' provides checklists of key induction tasks, essential information about support services and student opportunities, maps and social features.

The key feature of 'Welcome to UCL', however, is a collated schedule of academic and non-academic induction events. For the first time, students will be able to see all events in one place and will be able to tag these in order to make up their own personalised calendar of sessions.

So far, dozens of staff members have contributed information about their induction events for the app, and it's our intention for the schedule to be a 'one stop shop' for students to view a complete induction timetable and organise their first few weeks.

Representatives from each faculty and central Professional Services have been helping to coordinate the capture of this information for the hundreds of induction events that take place in late September and early October. If you are a member of staff organising an induction event and haven't yet provided information about this, please get in touch.

Similar initiatives in other institutions have seen huge success; King's College London, for example, saw the first iteration of their welcome app downloaded more than 17,000 times in the run-up to last September.

The app is being widely shared with new students to encourage as many downloads as possible. The main avenue for promotion is the confirmation email that students receive after completing the mandatory pre-enrolment task online.

For any enquiries regarding the 'Welcome to UCL' app, please contact Wes Durdle, Communications and Projects Manager in Student Support and Wellbeing.

Download the Welcome to UCL app

Wes Durdle, Communications and Projects Manager, UCL Student Support and Wellbeing