Nellia Kornilova – World Englishes: Accents and Globalisation
This episode features Nellia Kornilova, a third year BA student studying European and International Social and Political Studies at UCL, International Officer at Students’ Union UCL and co-founder of the multidisciplinary blog The Gazetta. Nellia is also a member of the PsychUP for WellbeingAdvisory Board and is part of the Services and Pathways working group.
In this episode, Nellia discusses multilingualism, learning English, and the unique interaction between accents and identity. She also draws on her experience as an International Officer and voices the concerns of international students, whilst providing her own heart-warming perspectives.
You can also catch this episode on SuperdiverseUCL’s website or SoundCloud.
Post by Tori Sasaki, MSc student and Peer Link Worker with PsychUP for Wellbeing and Students’ Union UCL
Reading time: ~ 3 mins
PsychUP for Wellbeing and Students’ Union UCL have teamed up to pilot peer support sessions for students at UCL, as part of the Student Mental Health Partnerships projects funded by the Office for Students and led by UWE Bristol. Tori describes this new model of support and reflects on the experience of being a Peer Link Worker. Find out more about the sessions and book a slot with a Peer Link Worker here.
UCL has so many resources available to students who are struggling with a wide variety of issues, from Student Psychological and Counselling Services (SPCS) to International Student Support to the Students’ Union Advice Service, toDisability, Mental Health and Wellbeing (DMHW), and more. Navigating these services, however, can be overwhelming, and sometimes a more accessible and appealing first step is to seek support from someone who understands, on some level, what you’re going through. Someone who is a trained peer who can listen to what’s on your mind, share their own experiences when appropriate, and help direct you to the most useful further resources. We know from the PsychUP for Wellbeing IMPACTS peer-led research that many students valued talking to a fellow student about their mental health experiences, and expressed a desire for more peer support at UCL. That’s where the Peer Link Worker programme comes in.
The Peer Link Worker pilot project is a collaboration between PsychUP for Wellbeing, Students’ Union UCL and the UCL University Clinic. It began in May of this year and will run until December, with the goal of using feedback from the pilot to inform a longer-term project. All newly-recruited Peer Link Workers receive training so they can support their fellow students effectively. Peer Link Workers offer remote one-to-one and group support sessions, as well as remote follow-up workshops to psychoeducational videos that Trainee Clinical Psychologists have made on topics such as assertiveness, perfectionism, and stress and relaxation. We recently ran a group session focused on students’ feelings about returning to campus this year and are working on creating group sessions based on other topics as well. Individual support sessions have been run every day during the pilot, Monday to Friday. Support is open to all UCL students. Students come to us for one or two sessions, during which they also learn about other types of support services offered that fit their individual needs.
As well as benefiting students who sign up to the service, Peer Link Workers are also trained in incredibly valuable skills.
I was particularly drawn to the Peer Link Worker project because it aligns both with my value of helping others and with my goal of going on to pursue a career in the mental health field. The project not only benefits students who sign up to the service by offering them much-needed emotional support and help navigating different situations and resources at UCL and beyond, but it also trains the Peer Link Workers in incredibly valuable skills. These skills include how to properly use self-disclosure of our own experiences, how to set and maintain appropriate boundaries, how to navigate different communication styles, and the best course of action to support a student who is in crisis. These are skills that will be useful in any individual’s personal and professional life, especially if one is pursuing a career as a mental health professional.
Peer Link Worker training at a glance1: Boundaries
One of the special aspects about the student-peer relationship is shared experience. Of course, every student has elements of their university experience which are unique to them, and it is the Peer Link Worker’s job to truly listen to what the student is saying and to refrain from making assumptions. However, many students share similar struggles including dealing with mental ill-health on top of coursework, the pressure to get top marks, the financial burdens of being a student, and navigating friendships and romantic relationships. Therefore, another student is in a uniquely helpful position to support their fellow students. It is also notable that the relationship between the Peer Link Worker and the student seeking support is a non-hierarchical one: Peer Link Workers approach the conversation as a peer and not as a mental health professional.
I am grateful that this Peer Link Worker project has been able to continue into this academic year, especially as the start of the year can be a time of overwhelming amounts of information as well as new experiences and challenges. More than 50 students have been supported through the pilot to date. I hope that students continue to utilise this new resource, and that they come away from sessions feeling listened to, validated, and supported during their student experience.
More about the Peer Link Worker pilot and evaluation
You can find out more about the peer support pilot and book a session on the Students’ Union UCL website here.
PsychUP for Wellbeing are carrying out an evaluation of the pilot to see how it helps students. When you book a support session with a Peer Link Worker, you can opt into the evaluation and give us feedback on how you found it.
1 The UCL peer support training was adapted from the Health Education England Competency Framework and Care City training.
Gladys Hui graduated from her BSc Psychology course at UCL last summer. Her dissertation was part of the IMPACTS projects and looked at the barriers preventing Chinese students from attending formal mental health services. She has remained an associate of PsychUP for Wellbeing and has co-designed the cultural connections buddy scheme with Lyndsey Li. This scheme aims to facilitate the formation lasting cross-cultural friendships by pairing international and UK students.
Since graduating, Gladys has been working as a Trainee Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner at Mind and is training at UCL. In this podcast she eloquently discusses her journey so far, reflecting on her cultural identity and perspectives on race. It provides fantastic insight into her experience of going to Hong Kong International School and boarding school in the UK, and being an international student at UCL. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we did!
SuperdiverseUCL is a podcast series funded by UCL Grand Challenges and co-hosted by Jiawei Ding and Lyndsey Li. They want to promote cultural awareness and inclusiveness through fortnightly conversations on a range of topics, with UCL students from different cultural backgrounds.
In the past few years studying at UCL as international students, we felt there was so much we could learn from conversations with our fellow students. UCL is an international university – 53% of our students come from countries outside the UK. Even within the UK student community there is lots of cultural diversity.
Conversations with people from other cultures allow us to learn about different people, giving us new perspectives, making us more curious and open-minded, and enabling us to embrace differences in the changing world. However, these opportunities are often lost.
We want to showcase and celebrate diversity, not simply label students by their race, ethnicity or nationality
Although there are calls to celebrate diversity, some students still find it challenging to engage and feel included. International students from a different backgrounds may feel out of place and find it difficult to approach new people, whilst home students have also told us they also struggle to find the right opportunities to connect with international students. These challenges may have been more significant this year, with teaching and student activities moved online because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
We have called the podcast ‘superdiverse’ because we want to showcase and celebrate diversity, not simply label students by their race, ethnicity, or nationality. We understand that everyone’s journey is unique, and we’d like to hear about the different views and stories that each individual journey has brought.
We are hoping that by participating in and listening to the podcast, students feel empowered to contribute to cross-cultural discussions in an active way. We hope our conversations will introduce you to new perspectives, and virtually accompany you at this unprecedented time.
Post by Verity Sutcliffe, PsychUP for Wellbeing student (historic post from Spring 2020)
Reading time: ~ 5 mins
Ever wondered what UCL students were talking about when the pandemic first hit? Verity, a final year student at UCL, discusses the results of her thematic analysis of UCLove posts from the first two weeks of the pandemic. (We didn’t want to lose this blog, which was posted on our old site in Spring 2020.)
The COVID-19 outbreak has triggered changes in the way we communicate. With lockdown regulations enforcing we stay in our homes, online communication is playing an essential role in many people’s daily lives.
Focusing on the student population specifically, some are turning to online forums to express their anxieties about the pandemic. This can be seen as an efficient way to gain insight and support from fellow students. Sharing problems online can provide an opportunity for students to communicate how they are feeling to a responsive and sympathetic listener.
One student-run outlet for discussing such anxieties has been Facebook confession pages. Created by students, these pages have gained popularity at several universities, as they have facilitated mass-scale student-to-student communication – with UCL’s UCLove amassing over 23,000 followers and 17,000 likes in the three years it has been operating.
We can all sometimes focus on specific concerns when there are deeper feelings underlying these
These pages began with a sort of ‘hive mind’ framework, where students can submit confessions and queries, to which other students can collectively respond to. With posts anonymous, yet public for followers to interact with, students from every demographic (i.e. students from all sectors of the university, and potentially other universities also) can offer advice and sympathy to their peers.
Recently, over 10% of posts have touched upon anxieties related to COVID-19: a potential source of insight into how students are feeling during this time, and how these feelings may change as the situation evolves.
As a final-year UCL student, I started my undergraduate degree around the same time UCLove was created, so I have followed its progression into the successful platform it is today. Therefore, I am interested in how it is currently being used by students to express their worries and concerns.
I extracted posts on the UCLove page during the two weeks straddling the day a pandemic was declared by WHO (4-18 March), and thematically analysed them (see text box for how).
During this fortnight, COVID-19-related posts quadrupled. I identified six main themes in the posts which outline the explicit content of the anxieties that were raised (e.g. travel). However, there are also potential latent meanings that can be explored (e.g. a feeling of powerlessness).
This distinction between literal and interpretive analysis is important: we can all sometimes focus on specific concerns when there are deeper feelings underlying these, which we may not even be aware of.
If we are going to understand the impact of COVID-19 on people, this distinction could also be relevant for seeing how people’s concerns change. We might expect at least some explicit concerns to change as the situation does, but some of the deeper concerns might be more intractable.
For example, one theme draws upon the decisions being made by UCL regarding the academic year. One student writes, ‘Anyone else really nervous about online exams?? I find it so much harder to concentrate at home compared to in an actual exam hall, and I hate doing my exams from a screen rather than paper’.
This references an explicit concern towards the choice to move assessments to online platforms. It may also reflect an implicit fear about how changes to assessment affects the student’s grades, which will impact on their future.
The six explicit themes identified from the UCLove corpus data, with the % of posts that referenced each theme
Another identified theme is the anxiety towards daily-life changes. One student reports, “everything is changing for the way in which we lead our lives. It’s scary, difficult to concentrate…on work. There are so many unknowns…”.
This references nervousness towards the lifestyle adaptations that were being introduced around this time. These may include the UK-wide social distancing and self-isolating guidelines, as well as more university-specific regulations such as the closure of libraries and cancellations of face-to-face lectures.
This could imply the student is concerned about the unpredictability and longevity of the virus. These are new adjustments we have learned to adhere to, and the uncertainty of how long for may instil a sense of unease. This unease may manifest into latent anxieties that persist throughout the outbreak’s duration.
This preliminary look into UCLove and its content suggests that students benefit from the model that confession pages offer. Perhaps the relationship between the anonymous-poster and public-commenter gives it its unique appeal. The identifiableness of the commenters is what gives their responses a more genuine and sympathetic feel, while the anonymity of the original poster allows for the discussion of personal problems without compromising their identity.
Without such pages, there would be less of a cohesive safe space for students to come together to support one another. These confession pages are a useful tool for students to discuss their issues openly to an engaging and approachable audience – who offered responses such as “I agree 100%” and “so relatable…stay safe” to the previously mentioned posts, respectively.
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