UCL Interdisciplinary Student Network

Increasing the social and academic cohesion between three related interdisciplinary courses at UCL: Human Sciences, Natural Sciences and Arts & Sciences (BASc)

 

Our events also succeeded at increasing social cohesion and enabled getting to know people who had taken similar courses, had similar interests or had faced similar issues.“

What did you set out to achieve?

Our aims involved increasing the social and academic cohesion between and raising the profile of three related interdisciplinary courses at UCL: Human Sciences, Natural Sciences and Arts & Sciences (BASc). This involved gaining the perspectives of staff and students in the three programmes and finding ways to create meaningful connections and share interesting and relevant information between them.

How did you go about?

We collected feedback on modules via a survey and created a website. We held a highly successful live music night and a module speed-dating event. We also organised a feedback social and meet and greet as well as documentary film screening on an interdisciplinary topic. We also set up a successful Facebook group where events have been shared and met with our course leaders who were very supportive of our initiative.

What went well?

The sharing of event information via social media was very effective, with students from a variety of degrees sharing interesting and relevant events on a regular basis. Our events also succeeded at increasing social cohesion and enabled getting to know people who had taken similar courses, had similar interests or had faced similar issues. Overall, faces from across degrees became more familiar.

Our project enabled increased ties between students from different degrees. Students are additionally more aware that students on other degrees may be in similar situations. The BASc module fair we run received good feedback, students appreciating the opportunity they were given to speed-date with elder peers who had taken the modules they were interested in. This more informal approach to choosing/talking about modules worked really well. The live music night was also a great success as it enabled people from the three degrees to get to know each other. 

What did you personally gain?

It was nice to be given a lot of responsibility and trust to organise and achieve our aims independently. It was equally nice to work together with people with similar ideas and motivation. We appreciated the funding and support offered by the ChangeMakers team. I also learnt a lot about myself and working in a team from scratch on an ambitious project.

It was nice to be given a lot of responsibility and trust to organise and achieve our aims independently.“

What challenges did you face? And how did you overcome them?

The module feedback proved to be harder than initially thought. More specifically, we wanted to increase the openness of Moodle so students can take a look at a course before taking it. We were informed however that this would require asking every single module organiser to open up Moodle which is a whole ChangeMakers project in itself!

What would you do differently?

We should probably have had a smaller team. We thought that by including more people, we could also have a more diverse group of people that would reflect all the issues people have in interdisciplinary degrees and share the workload. However, it ended up to be more unclear who was doing what and it was quite impossible to meet up with all the people at the same time which made it an organisation-nightmare. With a smaller team we probably could have gotten more done.