The Student Success Academy offers a wide range of personalised opportunities and tailored programmes designed to help students unlock their full potential. Sophie recruited and trained her team from scratch, devising a comprehensive programme of support for all students, but with a particular focus on under-represented and BAME students.
The Future Talent programmes, Academic Success Coaching and the Get Ahead Together peer mentoring scheme are all components of the Student Success Academy and have already made a significant impact with over 600 students engaging with these new offers in the first month of term.
The Black Talent programme launched in October and already has 100 students signed up. This programme is designed to provide meaningful work experience to Black students, as well as connect them to employers with a genuine interest in recruiting diverse talent into their workforce. The team are now working on expanding their Future Talent opportunities with a new Asian Talent Programme launching in due course.
Over 250 students have signed-up or been referred to Academic Success Coaching with a newly expanded team of three dedicated coaches offering one-to-one advice and group sessions. These provide support across academic skills, confidence, motivation, procrastination, and study routines. Over 360 students have engaged with sessions on time management to date, and the team are building on this success with Dissertation Writing Retreats and extra-curricular workshops across schools in collaboration with the Academic Learning Support Service and the Library.
The Get Ahead Together peer mentoring scheme has also seen students from second and third year, and postgraduate courses supporting first year students across all Schools, helping them settle into university life and studying at undergraduate level.
On receiving the Vice Chancellor’s Award for her work, Sophie said: “It was a lovely surprise to be named a winner at the inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Awards. When I was a Loughborough student, the University provided me with so many unique opportunities, including support to run my own business for seven years, so any work I've done since has been driven by wanting to ensure our students have that same kind of life-changing experience I did.
“Working in Student Enterprise and now leading the Success Academy means striving to ensure that all students have access to and are made aware of the fantastic opportunities available to them. And it's certainly not all down to me – it's a huge team effort thanks to the brilliant Success and wider Careers Network teams!”
The Vice-Chancellor’s Awards have been created to recognise the ways our staff, both in teams and as individuals, demonstrate their commitment to the University's aims and values, especially around togetherness.