Keeping up a social, academic and work life balance can be tough while studying at university. However, students – and third-level institutions – are finding creative solutions to make sure students don’t miss out on clubs and societies.
Prof Celine Marmion, of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), explains how their student engagement and partnership (StEP) programme sees students and staff work together on research projects, with students paid for their time. “We’ve seen some with transformative results,” she says, “including a project led by a Brazilian medical student to allow Latin American students to be screened for Chagas disease, so they may be eligible to give blood.
“Working with our students, we also co-designed a student leadership development programme. This sees student council, club and society leaders receive leadership training, self-care and resilience skills, information on data protection and, also, equality, diversity and inclusivity training.
“At the start of this process, they do a self-evaluation and then, at the end, we ask them to do it again. They also write a reflection. We’ve seen a statistically significant increase across 12 of the 14 themes covered on the training.”
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Although students don’t always have the time to get involved in college life, smaller class sizes can help too. At RCSI, larger classes are broken up into learning communities of 60 students; this group of 60 is further divided into five groups of 12.
Amelie Treacy, a second year student on RCSI’s advanced therapeutic technologies (ATT) course, says that academic life can be busy, but she gets a break through involvement in clubs and societies.
“I was commuting from Meath for three hours a day, so I know that it can be hard,” Treacy says. “But I found the lecturers were very understanding about this, and the clubs and societies are accommodating with meetings often held online.
“I really enjoyed being class rep last year, and I’m heavily involved in the Gaelic Football Association and the ATT Society.
“I think students should try to join as many clubs and societies as possible, as it’s a great way to make friends and explore different interests. Doing the RCSI leadership course was a great opportunity to work on personal development and self-reflection,” she says.
