Yesterday (Friday) I shadowed Harriet. Normally her Friday is fairly busy, but this week two of her scheduled sessions didn’t happen, and the third, a 2-hour tutorial, only lasted about 30 minutes as students were fairly happy that they knew how to tackle the work set.

I met Harriet in the Robinson Library at 10:00 where she was working on her Stage 4 Mech Eng Team project. She is working with a team of 6 other students, and the whole team has been split into two groups. Harriet is working with two other students on a test rig (carried over from last year’s team project) related to the deflection of a foot (Harriet will be able to explain it much better than me). Someone else had written a draft interim report and Harriet was reviewing it on one of the Library PC clusters. I took along some reading of my own so that I could give Harriet some time to get on with her work, whilst still observing what she was up to and asking questions from time to time. At 11 we went to the tutorial, and returned to the Library after that. Shortly after one of Harriet’s group members called to ask if she fancied taking some measurements on the test rig. I met the other two members of Harriet’s group in the Mech Eng workshop. The room that they were working in was rather cold, certainly less than 19C.

After taking and recording measurements, which took about 45 minutes, we played hunt the free PC, which is is a particular challenge around midday. The cluster in Mech Eng was fully occupied, as was the one in the Old Library. We went to the Robinson Library and happened to turn up just as Moira Bent was finishing a booked session at 1. The two other members of Harriet’s group gave her some feedback on the changes she had made to the interim report. Harriet then spent a while on LinkedIn. I had always thought that this was just a Facebook for professionals to keep in touch on, but Harriet had been using it to get/keep in contact with various employers. In fact the two job offers that she had received had come through LinkedIn. I don’t know how much support we/the Careers Service are giving to this, but we need to ensure that our students have competitive advantage.

Earlier we had talked about feedback on coursework and examinations. Harriet had said that the former is very variable, some lecturers give very detailed feedback, others much less. Some use a standard pro forma, and this was appreciated.

At 3 Harriet had to leave the PC she was using because it was required for a booked session. She was able to get on another machine, although most of the cluster was very busy. With a few exceptions most students were actually doing work on their machines, rather than using Facebook. I left at that point, agreeing to shadow Harriet for another half day when she would expect to have more booked sessions.