The last nine months have been a very exciting time for me, both personally and professionally. I moved to a new city, I passed my driving test and got my license, made a lot of new friends in Exeter and on top of that I’ve had nine months in a brand new position as Higher Education project Officer at the University of Exeter’s Education Incubator.

As a Higher Education project Officer I’ve had the opportunity to dip my toes in a lot of different fields which has been very exciting for me and this has also meant that I’ve had to be very flexible in my responsibilities and I’ve had to hit the ground running in a lot of areas. Through this position I’ve had a hand in communications, project management, events planning, bug testing of all things, administration, filming and even copyright law.

Some of my favourite moments through this role have been when everyone comes together as a team to accomplish a task, especially when this pertains to events that have been planned for months come together on the day.

My favourite of the events we’ve planned and run this year was the Learning Spaces Walk part of the Learning Reimagined stream. A tour across the University Campus’s Learning Spaces conducted by Prof Sue Prince and the Head of Space and Design Helen Wallace to discuss how built pedagogy affects learning.

The tour was a fascinating dive into how students and staff interact with the built pedagogy around them and how that has changed over the last few years, a subject that isn’t discussed nearly enough in University I feel and it fed into a wider discussion of the place that lecturers and lecture theatres have within Higher Education now.

Another incubator project I’m quite excited to see where it will go next is the InVEnTA project, an interactive virtual environment creation toolkit for lecturers so they can quickly and simply create large interactive 3D landscapes by utilising Geospatial data gathered via GIS. I’ve had a hand at bug testing InVEnTA as well as helping the InVEnTA team conduct a workshop in the new Digital Humanities Seminar room where we and number of guests got hands on experience with the toolkit on a large 4K screen.

What I’ve enjoyed the most about working at the Education Incubator however has been the opportunity to work alongside academics and professional services staff to see the work and research that goes into the field of pedagogy and seeing first-hand how this work goes on to mould the teaching at the University of Exeter.

Overall it’s been a very positive and educational nine months for me and I’m very excited to take everything I’ve learned while I’ve been in this vocation to my next role.

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