“Amplifying student voices, particularly those of our EU and International students, is a key part of my work and I didn’t want this to stop because of the pandemic, so I’ve had to find different ways of finding and talking to students.”
I always wanted to work in marketing or communications, so when I finished university I started working as a copywriter. I had a couple of different jobs in marketing and communications over the next few years. I worked for the British Transport Police as their Social Media and Campaigns Officer for a while – that was a great job! After I changed roles, I found I missed social media and content creation. That’s when I applied for my current position as Social Media and Campaigns Officer in Imperial’s Student Recruitment and Outreach team.
My current role is to help the College recruit students from a wide variety of backgrounds. I create engaging content for prospective students on social media to help inform and educate them about studying with us and being part of the student community at Imperial.
COVID-19 has meant changing the way I work. Ordinarily, I would meet and collaborate with a lot of students in person. It takes a very proactive approach to find the students and that’s been much more challenging. Amplifying student voices, particularly those of our EU and International students, is a key part of my work and I didn’t want this to stop because of the pandemic. I’ve had to find different ways of finding and talking to students.
Not only did the pandemic make it much harder to find students, it also made it harder to film them. I had to rely on teaching students how to film their own content virtually. Normally when I film, I can take a much more hands-on approach such as asking students to repeat sections or help to steer them and reshoot parts if necessary. I can’t do that at the moment, so I’ve been coaching students on how to do some of those bits themselves. The students have been amazing and still up for taking part which has been fantastic. The content we’ve been producing is still of a high quality too which is great.
We have publicised a lot of things that students were doing to help during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the Feed the Workers campaign. Posts like that have been really popular on our social media channels and it’s been fantastic to shine a light on the great things our students have been doing.
Using our social media channels to help share authentic and diverse student stories and experiences has really helped our prospective students feel welcome, whatever background they come from.