Sophie reflects on her experience as a Partners in Learning student working on the Learning and Teaching Strategy project, and perhaps what she might have done differently.

Right from the initial meetings of the Partners in Learning Programme, the whole team was far more enthusiastic about the project than any group I’d worked with before. The whole team seemed to come together and work easily with each other very quickly which made the brainstorming process much more effective and much more enjoyable.

The main issue for myself personally was the timescale we had for the project, which was rather daunting. However, taking it upon ourselves to organise meetings outside the main Wednesday meeting was one of the best decisions the team made, as it has meant that we were able to hit the ground running quicker and cover much more ground than we would have if we had kept the meetings to once a week.

In hindsight, I think we all agree as a group that a type of skills audit in the early days would have been really useful as then we could have determined each other’s strengths and weaknesses from the outset and could have tailored our tasks and our brainstorming to these strengths and weaknesses. For example, my main strengths (as have now been established) are my position on the committee of a society and the links that provides me to the leadership of the Student Union and my performance background which means I very rarely get nervous when talking to a group of people and most come off confident in presentations. However, being a dual honours student, the Vice President of a Society and doing an Extended Essay has meant that my main weakness is having the spare time to go and physically gather the research.

Sophie Worrall