FACULTY OF BRAIN SCIENCES
‘Things I Wish I Had Known’: International
students' experiences of induction
Dr Alex Standen, a.standen@ucl.ac.uk
BACKGROUND
OUTCOMES
•  Within the Faculty of Brain Sciences around a third of our
students are international.
•  Nearly all students felt that they would have benefitted from
more information before they arrived at UCL about the key
services, both academic and pastoral.
•  During a welcome event organised for this cohort in 2013, we
realised that many students had uncertainties around
academic expectations, the processes and conventions of UK
higher education and their preparedness for study in the UK.
•  Six volunteers from the participating students were asked to
write a section for a leaflet which we decided to call, ‘Things I
wish I had known’.
•  Supported by a CALT small grant, we ran a series of focus
groups to garner opinions about international student
experiences of induction with the hope of delivering some
tangible benefits for the next cohort of incoming students.
•  Around 20 students were involved in total, from all levels (UG,
PGT and PGR) and from all across the Faculty. They
represented both a variety of programmes of study and a
variety of cultural backgrounds.
•  Sections included, ‘What is a lecture?’, what different degree
classifications mean and methods for feeding back on their
experiences.
•  The leaflet was sent to all incoming international students
across the Faculty three weeks prior to the start of term
THE LEAFLET
!
!
!
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SOME FEEDBACK FROM THE FOCUS GROUPS
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!
I don’t even know if we have
a student rep!
My school system back
home was very different,
exam based, we learn
everything by heart and we
just go to exams. Here,
everything is essay based,
it’s research based learning
and assessment and I
struggled a lot in the first
term.
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The education system is so
different to home. Some basic
courses on how to do your PhD
etc are so popular that I
couldn’t take them – I was
slower than native students,
and got left behind.
I didn’t take essay based subjects
at school, and needed guidance,
like when listening to lectures,
what should I learn? I had a
transition mentor who was quite
helpful, provided information,
guidelines on how to write an
essay, but once a week was
maybe not enough: writing my
first essay was really hard work.
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"!
When international
students arrive
they are stressed,
everything is new –
they don’t want to
be searching for
information.
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There are so many
different offices, so
many different
places…it’s
mindblowing, what
does this office do?!
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I didn’t know how many
questions I could go to my
tutor with; I only saw her once,
it wasn’t introduced in an
appropriate way. I didn't know
what the boundaries are.
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a specific problem. I kept
going to the main office and
they always directed me but
I wish there had been a way
to find out beforehand where
to go.
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!
REFLECTIONS
•  The project was entirely driven by current students and
provided informal support at a peer-to-peer level. "
•  It gave a voice to international students from across the
Faculty about concerns that they had not been able to find
through existing routes. "
•  The leaflet was very well received by incoming students and
opened up a dialogue with them. "
•  As a further benefit, it helped to improve cross-faculty
networking and build a sense of community in a large and
geographically diverse faculty.
The project was kindly sponsored by the UCL Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/)