Moments that Matter: Understanding the Student Lifecycle
A new student arrives with two bags and a car full of belongings, and by the end of the first day they’ve been handed a timetable, a login, a campus map, a list of societies, told to download 12 different apps and left with a room full of strangers they’re meant to start calling friends. It’s a lot to absorb for anyone, especially someone who only a few hours earlier, was still saying goodbye to their parents in a car park.
UCAS found that 71% of prospective students name making friends as their biggest worry about starting university – ahead of the academic side entirely. And yet that first week is where a student’s ability to cope with their unfamiliar systems – how to enrol, which platform to use for what, where to actually go – is really put to the test.
The university usually knows a lot about the student walking through the door before they arrive: where they’re from, what they’re studying, whether they’re moving into halls or commuting from home. The more interesting question is how much of that is actually being used to make the first fortnight easier.
A commuter student, someone in halls for the first time, an international student a long way from home, and a mature student balancing a family alongside a degree are not having the same first week. They may be sitting in the same induction lecture, but there’s no reason the digital experience has to treat them as though they are. A starting point built around what’s actually relevant to each of them – the right induction sessions, the services they’re likely to need, the communities they might want to find -does more for someone in their first week than another generic welcome email ever will.
Done well, this isn’t really about building another app. It’s about connecting up identity, data and services closely enough that a university notices where students are getting stuck and fix it before it turns into a wave of the same complaint.
There’s a more ambitious version of this too: helping students find each other, not just information. Many universities start help student meet their Halls-mates in the weeks leading up to the start, so they can begin to talk and make friends. But why not extend that out? A society that fits, a course community, a peer group – the things that make a large, unfamiliar institution start to feel like somewhere a person belongs. Technology can’t manufacture that feeling on its own. What it can do is make the route to it easier to find, in a week when everything else already feels hard to find.
For universities, Welcome Week is the sharpest test: did the experience promised at the Open Day, or delivered in that first Clearing phone call, hold up once a student is actually living on campus.
Pre Sales Architect
Kevin Mortimer is a Solution Architect with 25 years in technical leadership roles across varied cyber and infrastructure domains. Evangelising technology is a passion especially around sustainability outcomes and community engagement. Kevin is an avid volunteer focussing on supporting young people including; Cub leader, Chair of School Governors and a youth rugby coach.
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