Lupins and Interns

This week so far has been a mixture of meetings, catch ups and Chelsea Flower Show - my annual pilgrimage. So, here's a picture of the Best in Show Laurent Perrier garden with smashing yellow lupins:

Right, that's out of the way, (although I have several hundred more if anyone wants to see them....) Now to work.

Today I was privileged to go to an event celebrating our graduate interns. This is the second year of the scheme, and the  interns are about to finish their placements. We have been lucky to have one for the last two years working on our comms team mainly producing videos and other multimedia materials. Who can forget fileman, one of our more successful student campaigns, and I was pleased to see that he made it on to the poster:

Each intern had produced a poster, and then there was a presentation about the projects they had undertaken - extremely wide ranging. As well as ours, they included:
ONlone module choice
How we buy
Cntral post franking
Staff Survey
Women in HE
Web design and development
In The City - Public Engagement events
Student projects including weareinternational and standbyme and the Sprint programme

A fascinating set of projects, and some very professional presentations

As part of the programme they all felt they had acquired a number of transferable skills - the key ones being professionalism, communication and problem solving. 

In the discussion afterwards they identified some of the key challenges they had had to face, and as well as understanding how the university works, the biggest was resistance to change. Now there's a surprise ;-)

Great event - and very well done to all of the interns.