"As a project assistant, I represented student perspectives in every step towards V4 of StrathApp. My initial responsibility was to review the features of Strath App, provide user feedback and present it to my immediate team (fellow project assistants, MADEU core team and board members. The highlight task undertaken by me was preparation for freshers fair 2024 at University of Strathclyde where me along with whole team interacted with approximately 800 students. We gathered user feedback from students right after launching V4. Being a Strathclyde student myself, this event helped me to gain more ideas from other students and present it to my whole team for continuous improvement. Another highlight task that I got as project assistant was to get an opportunity to contribute to Equality Impact Assessment report. While preparing this report with my team I got a chance to implement my academic learning. Overall, I enjoyed working in this post and learned lifelong professional skills.
"Initially I was quite hesitant to apply for this post as the title was IT Project Assistant. I thought I am not from IT field so my skills may not be suitable for this post. But when I read the job description it was much more than just IT assistant and were looking for someone from diverse background academically and professionally. The job description also reflected Strathclyde ethics and value which I felt during my academic year at Strathclyde and throughout my tenure as project assistant in this project. I also came from a diverse student background, humanities and social sciences in academics plus South Asian and most importantly a user of the app. Thinking about all these, I immediately got excited to apply and contribute my diverse ideas in the team.
"Working as a project assistant gave a lifelong learning in project management. I learned transferrable IT skills, communication skills, report writing, agile methodology and digital content creation. To be more specific, in IT skills I used MS office packages, Teams, Outlook and many more. I learned to prepare important project reports such as project close-down reports by reviewing project initiation report, monthly highlight report and business case report. Similarly, learned to prepare Equality Impact Assessment report by handling sensitive information related to protected groups under university policy. Also, this experience enhanced my data analysis skills, specially preparing the students app feedback from Freshers Fair. These are the transferable skills I learned that will help me to build my future professional career.
"For now, this experience has helped me to land in a lot of job interviews specifically in project management and administrative jobs. For long run, these skills will help me to maintain stakeholder communication, critical thinking while analysing and preparing project reports, work in diverse team and provide customer service. I am excited to use these skills soon which will be valuable for my new job.
"I highly encourage other departments to apply this model where student and department cooperation is needed. This student co-creation model helps to hear straight from students and quickly implement their ideas to work towards a common goals. Most importantly, this opportunity will help to understand from both student and staff perspectives working to fix any concern and issues. This project is very meaningful where students are included to create a digital learning for themselves and by themselves. I still feel proud and happy to be part of this student co created project where I genuinely felt heard, included and respected in each step of my project journey." - Ayushi Bista, MSc Applied Gender Sciences