Students as Partners in Practice Conference

Hello there, Blogger! S'been just over a month since my last post, mostly because I've up to the metaphorical eyeballs with uni work rather than work work. Actually, that isn't true. My eyeballs are not metaphorical, they are in fact very real. But it would still be untrue to say that the work is metaphorical, as although I do frequently use metaphor in my writings they are, on the whole, also very real. The metaphor actually only works if you choose to imagine me standing in that work, which is a little odd visually as I do most of my stuff on the old computer. I suppose you could imagine me up to my eyeballs in a pile of electronic goods, but that would probably give the impression I've just won a particularly cool prize, like on the Gadget Show. When I have, in fact, been doing work.

Look, I've been busy.

A busy bee. Or a swarm of busy bees,
determined to take their revenge
on humanity.

The one major piece of Mentor work I've done was attend the Students as Partners in Practice conference at the University of Glamorgan's Treforest campus. Or "the old homestead", as I like to think of it.

In essence, it was a number of speeches followed by a number of workshop-like affairs, followed by questions to the panel. On the whole I was rather pleased by the whole affair; particularly in that it wasn't just a group of academics and bureaucrats deciding for themselves the needs of students. Students appear to be consulted at just about every stage, and a lot of sensible questions were raised. Most of those can be found here, in a handy Twitter Storify thing. Yes, that is about the extent of my understanding of what happened there. 

Incidentally, the event appears to have turned me into some sort of Twitter whore. For those looking to see what was said on Twitter, #HESTUDENTPARTNERS is the hashtag that you're looking for.

The only controversial question that seemed to arise - on Twitter actually, and was scarcely touched upon by the panel itself - was the concept of remuneration for student advocacy roles. Put in English, that is to say paying students for fulfilling roles such as Student Mentors. Or, put in Gaf, Paying Me for my Mother F@&%ing Time.

Granted, it's not as clear cut as all that, but it seemed a shame to end an otherwise positive event on a note that seemed to fly in the face of an equal relationship between students and institutions.

It's okay to sound mercenary. Boba says so.

Other than that? I grew a glorious moustache for Movember and raised £45. I'm not actually sure what the MoMentors raised as a whole, but between bake sales and assorted other shenanigans I'm sure we did very well! Nice one Rogue Squadron. I also got Photoshop back on my computer after several years, and have been wasting far too much time re-learning how to use the bloody thing. As a consequence, I now have a shiny new header for this blog, which makes me approximately 76.7% more awesome than I was before. 

I'm clearly rambling now, so until next time!

Mental Health First Aid: Day 2

And thus concludes the training. Interestingly, I thought today was going to be even more intense, given the topics. But whilst I was a bit wobbly in the morning, all told it seemed a lot easier; guess there really is a lot to say for being prepared.

So yeah. The whole bloody thing has been particularly enlightening, from gaining a 'proper' understanding of things I've already experienced in some capacity to learning things I was previously flat out wrong about. Including some quite frightening things; not from the mentally ill themselves (forget what you thought you knew, you're more likely to be eaten by hedgehogs than actually harmed by a schizophrenic or the like), but from everyone else. The police? Less training in mental health than I've now had. GPs? Less training in mental health than I've now had.

I'm now considerably more confident in dealing with these things. Sure, the certificate is gonna look great on the old CV, and it's gonna make certain aspects of Mentoring that much less intimidating. But frankly this is the sorta stuff that'll always be bloody handy. Intense as it was, I'm really hoping to do the ASIST training if I can, really round off my capacity to help with these things.

Mental Health First Aid, Day 1

So, day one of the Mental Health first aid course, that some of you'll no doubt be doing early next year. Here's the thoughts so far;

If you've ever had mental health difficulties, or have known someone with mental health difficulties, or some obscene combination of both, this course is heavy. Really, seriously heavy. I don't say it often, but I could really use a sodding hug at the moment. Or a pint. Or both. I figure it'll be a bit different for everyone so there's not a great deal of sense in me getting specific, but don't do what I did. What I did was walk in expecting something a little hippy-dippy about not being judgemental and the value of listening; that stuff is there, but there's a lot of much, much deeper stuff.

Thought two is that despite that, I'm really glad I'm doing this. Sure it's tough, but few things of value are ever really easy, right? And as life goes by, the odds of any of us never meeting someone who suffers from a mental illness are slim to none. And while a two day training course isn't going to provide you with the tools to fix them - nor is it supposed to - but the level of understanding that you pick up is already invaluable.

Well, there we go. Not my most cheerful post I guess, and not a single nerdy picture to break things up a bit. But like I said, definitely a worthwhile course to be on, even without the Mentor pay and the CV-enhancing certificate at the end of it.

So, there's been a few Mentor-ey things happening over the last few weeks. Figure I'd best be blogging, then!

The big one was the Holistic Learning seminar. I'll be honest, I was suspecting this one might be a little on the boring side; you know, a bunch of people talking in dull voices about dull subjects, maybe the worlds most boring people talking about about making learning exciting.

Gaf's Amazing Mentor Bloggerarium of Stuffs does not
condone this sort of behaviour. Yes, really. 

 But while there were a few dull moments (which lead to some of the most productive poetry writing I've done since getting back; five stanzas under the pretense of note taking [just don't tell Kerry]), I was actually pleasantly surprised. For one, it wasn't a purely UWN event, meaning that we got to meet all manner of folks involved in education from all over the shop. Secondly, being a CELT/CDEL thing the information given was actually practical and useful, rather than entirely theoretical. Third, us Mentors actually got to give a student perspective (which seems sort of important, really), and fourth, the free lunch was "bitching", as they say in my home ghetto.

So, how does one boil a really long seminar on complicated stuff down to the bare bones (and preferably without inane jargon)? Well, essentially it was about an expanded curriculum. As it stands, we humble students pay out a small fortune, and in return we get a degree. Simple enough concept.

However, these days a degree isn't much on its own. Chances are you'll need additional things, like a MA or a PGCE, even a PhD. At the very least you'll need a whole host of extra-curricular stuff, and sometimes you'll even need the extracurricular stuff to get on to the relevant post-grad course.

Basic stuff, and not exactly news. What is news is that institutions are looking at addressing it, and some already are to a degree. Things like guaranteed work experience and increased access to other relevant  CV-worthy stuff for one, but of particular interest to most of us was the idea of putting support in place for explaining how the stuff we already do can be put into terms potential employers may like. Sure, some faceless bureaucrat might not be interested in how you blew every Wednesday evening watching anime with J.A.M.S, but they might well be interested in how you managed to work as part of a team to organise multiple trips to London expos. Or had to deal with assorted departments to book rooms every week. Or managed the society budget. Or had to operate the technology. And so on.

Heck, as Mentors we already have something pretty damn cool to put on our CV, but with a little careers advice we could go into job interviews knowing how to milk it for all that it's worth. Handy stuff to think about it; hopefully it'll all be integrated an highly visible for future students, but in the meantime it's well worth thinking about now...

Restructure Meeting

So, just got to attend a meeting about the recent restructuring of the university, and the effect it's had on everyone. Was anyone actually aware of said restructure in any real detail? 'Cause while I knew something or other had happened, all the info I was getting fitted into that sorta vague, impending-doom-of-Glamorgan category.

So yeah. Turns out their was a restructuring, and now the support staff are a fraction of their former glory. Sorta like the British Empire, but without the dubious history (or maybe it does have a dubious history. These were some shady looking characters, and I'm certain that it can't be a coincidence that they arranged the tables into the bloody Cerberus logo. It was all a bit Illuminati, if I'm honest, though the dysfunctional Marvel version at best).

I will continue to post Mass Effect pictures
until you learn more about Mentoring.

Anyways, random I'm-Up-Too-Bloody-Early pseudo-rants aside, this is essentially the reason you may have noticed an increase in the fields of Cock-Ups, Chaos and Carnage (the three C's, seeing as no business meeting is complete without that sorta thing). Students not knowing what they're doing, where they're going, what their timetables and book lists are... essentially, it appears that all this is down to the restructuring.

Which would have been handy to know before, really. In my experience stressed out students are a bit easier to placate if they understand that actually, something has gone wrong. It's not them being useless, it's not that this is the system that is actually in place for dealing with this. It would have occasionally been handy, such as when we were calling people, to be able to say "Yeah, sorry about that. You see, there's been a recent restructuring to make the Uni a better place, but while it's adjusting it's a bit chaotic. Looks like you got hit by that that, so lets see if we can't fix it," rather than "What? Huh. Yeah, that's weird  Yeah, let's see what we can do."

But we can do now, which is nice. And frankly, whilst all this might well have impacted our jobs somewhat, we've gotten off lightly. But you might want to give Kerry a hug, or pretty much any member of staff you see who looks in danger of being strangled by their own temple.

Also, go watch Stressed Eric. It will make
you a better person.

Anyway, a proper feedback report thingie will no doubt appear on the Mentor Portal* at some point. Until then, I hope you enjoyed my incoherent babblings.





* Does anyone else really like the term "Mentor Portal"? It's like we have some sort of actual, extra-dimensional form of teleportation at our disposal.

"Wow Gaf, you sure got to class early today! Don't tell me the hellish form of mental, social and emotional torture they call the bus was actually on time today?"

"The bus? Ho-ho, I don't use the bus! No, the Mentor Portal sent me directly through Limbo to the front gate. I can't stop though, for wherever evil rests, we Mentors must be there to haunt it's dreams. Mentors Assemble! I am the Night."

Blog Training

So, today was the blog training that most of you have no doubt already attended. Always good fun learning to deal with the technological demands of the day to day life, and to celebrate I've now got a couple of bonus features on the old blog. You can subscribe by email or Google Reader, search the blog, or look at the pretty fish to distract yourself from the inane content.

We also learned about Google's Project Glass. I want one.

Did I mention that I want one? More sepcifically I want one that combines the functionality of Fallout 3's VATS system with the style and panache of Mass Effect's Garrus Vakarian.

Go ahead, punk. I'm streaming all of this as we speak.

Random, Largely Pointless Update

So, looking at my shiny new calender I can see that I've actually got no pre-planned Mentor stuff 'till Thursday, when I'll be training to use Blogger. Sort of like I'm doing now, admittedly, but possibly with an end result of more shebang. But in the interests of not letting this thing get stale, I shall now produce a Random, Largely Pointless Update.

This is Random. You may need to read more bad 90's X-Men.

So, what vaguely on-topic Mentor shizzle could I possible have to write about? Well, it's struck me over the last few weeks that I've already been using the last load of training we had quite a bit. I'm sure lots of us have had moments where we've thought "that bastard is totally an 'A' person", but I've used the more in-depth stuff too. Despite none of it actually relating to actual, proper Mentor work.

I've managed to help diffuse a rapidly escalating situation between campus security and a band they were trying to throw out. I broke up a fight outside the Meze. All of which were points where I've stopped and thought back to the old training, and gone "ah-ha!"

Well, more or less. I may have been drunk on both occasions. But mostly I've just been talking to bloody hundreds of new people. Between actually having to talk to new people at the training and the training itself, I suddenly seem able to grasp the concepts behind dynamic social mechanisms, without really understanding how. Which, when you think about it, is a very shiny thing.

Hopefully I get in on the mental health training soon, because the downside to all this is the rapid realisation that everyone else on this planet is almost as batshit, window-licking crazy as I am.

PAN Magazine

Two posts in one day! I'm a regular blogging machine...

It's a magazine. About Pans. 

Just to let you all know, PAN magazine this year contains a regular onslaught of student mentor work; Beth, Becky, Dave, Sam, Kelly and myself all have work in there. Mine is the best, obviously.

Anyone who wants a copy, just give me a shout; as my flatmate was one of the editors, I've a bag full of them here. And make sure to get your work in for next years edition!

New Blog!

Seems your not a proper member of this century unless you keep a couple of blogs, so here goes another one. For anyone interested, you can also find my occasional musings on the Quantum Geek, where me, Sam, a bunch of my flatmates and some of the CDEL team can be found waxing lyrical about all things geeky.

Anyway, enough shameless self promotion. Mentor blog time!

Unfortunately, I'm starting this a little late. So there's been a boat load of stuff already that I haven't talked about, but here goes...

So mentor training was actually awesome. Mentor training sessions are usually fun, so it wasn't a total shock, but what surprised me was how well everyone gelled as a group. No tempers, no egos, no using the amusing plastic crap on the tables to savagely beat one another to death. Even I got along with everyone there, and I tend to think people are shit (which is why I became a mentor, obviously).

It was also bloody useful too. Normally I loathe all that corporate crap; team-building (just *£&@ing talk to one another!), personal brand awareness (I'm not a *£&@ing brand!) and so forth. But I can't really remember ever thinking "Hey, this is a pointless waste of my time!" once, everything actually seemed useful. Especially some of the scenario roleplay stuff, I now feel somewhat prepared in the event I get accosted by a bi-polar heroin addict who just plain loves her cat. 

The social was all manner of fun, too. Kerry is clearly some sort of evil sadist, scheduling a night of alcohol and shenanigans when we all had to be in at nine the following day, but for all the trembling hungover mess that I was the following day, it was rather worth it. 

Since then, we've had enrolment.

I jest, I jest. I actually managed to enjoy most of that too! Of course, due to other commitments I only had three shifts, while some of you mad bastards were there nigh on constantly. I'm actually starting to suspect that Sharon is part machine. Having a hangover for my one shift probably wasn't my brightest idea, but fortunately around 99% of the people we enrolled that day were equally rough. Unfortunately, I did have one girl recognise me from the night before; yes, I was the mad bastard dancing on 200 Club's stage to Nirvana. At least nobody recognised me from the stripper pole a few hours later, I suppose.

Since then it's been pretty quiet from a mentor point of view. It's also been Freshers though, so the past few weeks have seen me hypnotised, dressed like a pirate, told I look like a pirate even when not dressed as one, show up in random blocks of accommodation at all hours, dress as Wayne from Wayne's World (with fellow mentor Dave Phillips as a worryingly accurate Garth), witness a strip-tease from a girl dressed as a Biker Mice from Mars and generally meeting all manner of new and mental people. I also went to a lecture.

So, until the next mentor-related affair worth me posting about, so long!