Hello all, it’s Vienne. I hope you had a lovely inter-semester break! If you’ve read my first blog post, you may remember me saying that I EYEBALLED every single email that came through so that I wouldn’t miss any learning opportunity on this doctoral journey. As I progress, I end up taking up six to seven other commitments concurrently. Recently, I got an email from Emily (from the VIP team) checking in with me “How’s the VIP going?” I just realised I hadn’t written a blog post for a while. Although time is tight, doing a VIP is still at the top of my list.
Last December, students who participated in the VIPs were invited to present at the end-of-semester event hosted by the Centre for Learning & Teaching. As for our team, we divided work among ourselves: Beth, Pat, Charlotte, and Hannah worked on data analysis; Refilwe contributed to a summary of our project background and some next steps; I was responsible for writing the survey development (e.g., the promotional strategies) and designing the poster. As Refilwe and I worked together closely, we scheduled a separate meeting. It has been three months since we met last time. It was a great time catching up, having fun, and discussing the poster.
Soon after the meeting, I tried different designs but decided to share my favourite (see far right) with the team. I put the chosen poster template on Teams and left a remark: I used a few pictures from Shutterstock on a free trial. I was thrilled to bits to see Emily’s (from the VIP team) reply. She signposted to us that the Centre for Ageing Better launches a free image resource library. Such a recommendation saved my day as I had tried different keywords and been browsing for two hours and STILL couldn’t find what I was looking for. After receiving feedback from my teammates, such as the chosen pictures having a seemingly strong orientation to young adults, I had another go.
Here were some of my tries.
The poster (left) was a semi-final version, and the poster (right) was the final.
We were grateful to have Beth and Charlotte presenting onsite on the day of the event. Kudos to Man who took this picture.
Due to space limitations, we couldn't put everything on the poster. Our next steps include doing another round of data analysis and creating a one to two-page summary of the findings. We would also love to share some quotes from the participants with you.
To end this post, I’d like to thank those who read my work. It was not until Anna Boneham, Volunteer and Society Manager from the SU, reached out to me that I realised my blog posts were one of the effective ways to communicate our work to a wider audience. Anna remarked, “We are keen to make sure collaboration is happening between departments to maximise the impacts of projects such as these.” Her words truly brightened my day! The meeting with Anna on 18 January 2023 went well. More updates will be provided in the next post. I believe we are going together, slowly but surely.
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