UConn HESA Across the Globe

Follow the Glasgow Three! An annual group of rising second year students in the University of Connecticut's Higher Education & Student Affairs Masters Program, conducting an assessment project in Scotland.

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Hello from Across the Pond!

Can you believe that we are writing this with 2 ½ days to go? We can’t! Twas just yesterday we were purchasing our flights!

Our last weekend was filled with much activity, Lauren and Emily went on a 2 day excursion to The Highlands where they visited Loch Ness and a whiskey distillery. They were unable to get a good look at Nessie but it was a great opportunity for them to see Scotland and all its wonder. Abigail mused around Glasgow a bit and also made a trip to Stirling where she was able to go on a tour of the Castle.

The universe has blessed us with some amazing Scottish friends who work at the Uni and in the area. They have gone out of their way to show us a great time with a Sunday night out on the town and also pub trivia on Tuesday night. While we didn’t win trivia we walked away with a prize for best joke!

As it is our last week (grabs tissues), our focus has been on writing the final report and preparing for our presentation on Friday. The weather has been absolutely fantastic with sunshine predicted for the remainder of the week, we are confident that the sun will shine our project :).

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Hello again! This week has been full of meetings, but we've learned some great new things and are becoming more prepared to share our findings and recommendations next week. We are officially ONE WEEK out from being done, or, from a different perspective, two weeks into the project. 

We found a beautiful staircase when visiting members of the University Senate (administrators), and we did a little exploring around the main building, as well. We stumbled upon a chapel, as well as the Hunterian Museum, full of a large variety of scientific specimens and information. 

We've finished coding our focus group and are working on themes now. There is a lot of data, both from the focus group and from our meetings with staff members, but we’re excited to know we’ll have a lot to share come next week. 

We also experienced 5 different kinds of Scottish whiskey last night, all of which had very distinct flavors. How could we come to Scotland and not try whiskey??? Some of them were more enjoyable than others, and some of us liked them while some of us didn’t. Between the Irn Bru soda, the large amount of tea biscuits and sweets, multiple orders of fish and chips, and the Scottish whiskey and beer, we are doing a lot to get a full Scottish experience!

Lauren and Emily are headed up to the Highlands tomorrow for the weekend, and it looks like Abigail will have some time to relax. Monday is a bank holiday, which means the Uni is closed. It seems we’ll still be working away to finish everything up, though.

Till next time!

Cheers!

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We have been busy! We finished our focus group last week and have now finally finished transcribing it. We've started coding the transcription and are already looking at some great data. Our survey should be sent out today via Facebook and Twitter to University of Glasgow followers. We also have/had meetings set up with various offices and individuals around campus, including the Learning and Teaching Centre, Disability Services, members of the University Senate (administrators) who oversee the assessment policy and the feedback policy, and individuals who work in Student Conduct and their Student Code. We've gained such great insight into how assessment and feedback works at the University of Glasgow, and I think we’re all excited to bring the data together to hopefully make some good recommendations. 

Abigail also celebrated her birthday in London over the weekend, visiting some family she has there. She had the opportunity to eat some great food from all over the world at a local market and explore a little more of her home country. 

Emily and Lauren headed to the Isle of Arran on Sunday, taking a train and a ferry to get there. It is one of the bigger Scottish Isles and offers a lot geographically. It was a gorgeous day, and they were able to experience a variety of local food, as well as locals playing tunes together on guitars, fiddles, flutes, a bagpipe, and a harp! 

Stay tuned for more adventures, and as always, send us any questions you may have!

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Lauren and Emily through a little supper meal together for Abigail to celebrate her birthday from over the weekend. You’ll get a good representation of their dance skills here.

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Yesterday was our first official rainy day in Scotland. We lucked out for the first few days with sunshine and beautiful weather. It couldn't last forever. 

After finalizing our focus group questions, we decided to use the city bus site-seeing vouchers our sponsors provided for us and take a little tour around Glasgow in the afternoon. We ended the evening at a great little Vietnamese restaurant off of Ashton Lane in the West End, sharing some wonderful dishes and good laughter. 

We've also greatly enjoyed the welcome packages provided for us (our project sponsors are awesome), using the mug everyday for tea, the Scots Dictionary to try and fit in with the locals, and the goodies to keep us motivated. None of us were a big fan of the Irn Bru (pronounced Iron Brew) soda, as it has a pretty medicinal taste to it. Fun to try new things, though! 

Today is the focus group, and we’re excited to get some student contact and direct data for our project! We’ll keep you all posted, and thanks for following our journeys. Remember, you can ask us questions with the link at the top if you’d like!

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Hoping for a successful time in Glasgow after walking down some well-known stairs, walked on by Adam Smith, Albert Einstein, and Lord Kelvin, thought of as lucky by the students. 

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We've now been in Scotland for about four days (including our first very jetlagged day on Saturday). Apart from trying to switch time zones and overcome head/chests colds (for two of us), we've been walking around and exploring the city a lot. We've taken a walking tour of campus and learned a little history and architecture of the University. The people have been wonderful, and we've thoroughly enjoyed our goodie bags provided by our sponsors.

Glasgow3 is assessing an online assessment and feedback toolkit for faculty and students, and we're focusing on the student resources aspect of the toolkit. We're ending Day 2 of working on the assessment project, and so far we have a great data collection plan, a draft interview protocol, ideas for either a paper or online survey, and a start on reading through the University's Assessment Codebook. There's a lot more to go, but we're excited to be tackling this project!

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All done with our assessment project and presentation! We are so grateful for all the support from UofG. Our experience both in and out of the office has made Glasgow feel like a home. Now for one last night out before our early morning flight!

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Today is the big day! We present in 15 minutes!

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On the Thursday before our last day the Glasgow 3 spent the day rehearsing. After work we visited the Huntarian Museum and went out for dinner and drinks! We went to two uniquely Scottish locations! The weather was so nice for our final hole home through the park. We are going to miss everything here except maybe the rain.

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We did it! The Sydney 3 conducted an assessment project in Australia in three weeks! We can’t believe it. It’s been such a pleasure working with the staff here at UNSW. We’ve learned so much in our time here, not just about the Cost of Living in Sydney and how that’s portrayed to international students, but about Australian institutions in general. Some of us would even love to work here someday. Georgia, and the whole UNSW International office, have been absolutely wonderful to us. Such friendly and supportive people! 

After receiving a lot of positive feedback on our presentation (and on the fact we all bought matching UNSW t-shirts), we handed everyone printed copies of our executive summary, received unexpected gifts from Georgia and headed out to the local bar to celebrate a job well done with staff members. So much food and drinks! We cannot be more happy with how this journey has ended. We look forward to keeping in touch with everyone here and continuing to build on the UConn-UNSW partnership. We have written thank you cards and organized UConn swag to give to staff members who have been nothing but helpful and supportive throughout the last three weeks. Cheers to UNSW, Universitas 21, UConn HESA, and Australia!

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Last night the Glasgow 3 were invited over for dinner by our colleague Liz. Dinner was amazing and then her husband Kevin entertained us with his passion for classical piano and opera! What a fun experience.

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Wow, we can’t believe how fast time flies!  TODAY IS THE DAY!  The Sydney 3 present at 4pm (3 hours from now) in the Level 1 Boardroom (our current work space).  We will present primarily on the Cost of Living project and walk everyone through our quantitative results and qualitative findings.  We will end by providing a variety of recommendations to our project sponsors and distributing our Executive Report.  We are excited and will post pictures of the actual event at some point.

Good luck to the Glasgow 3 on their upcoming presentation, also!

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Late Post! Tina and I had a wonderful two-day trip to Blue Mountains this past weekend where we ventured through the Bushwalks to Katoomba Falls, Leura Falls, and had stunning views to The Three Sisters (the rock structure above). Can you tell why the mountains are called the Blue Mountains? Our feet and legs are still pretty sore as we take tonight to finalize our executive summary and get ready to present tomorrow with Nancy. We are sure going to miss this place!

-Virginia 

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In the homestretch

181 Survey responses

18 Focus group participants

4 Transcriptions

3 Researchers

2 Days until our final presentation

1 Life changing experience 

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Hello!  On Friday night, the Sydney 3 had a fantastic “coffee” outing with our project sponsors, then made it to the international student movie night put on by the “Student Development International (SDI)” office!  We watched “The Grand Budapest Hotel” then had pizza with other international students!  Luckily the pizza was late...this gave us time to explain our research to the other students and we obtained 5 videos to assist us in our project (after they signed consent forms, of course)!  Woohoo!  Nancy & Virginia also had time to join in the games!  We had such a fun evening talking with these students (many of whom participated in our research) and are so thankful we were able to take this group photo for a memory :-D