The activities we’re involved with in BILT are hugely wide-ranging, from teaching academics via our CREATE courses to supporting educational research taking place across the University. We thought it would be a great idea to start sharing what each of us gets up to and highlight the brilliant opportunities and activities going on around campus.
This second edition is written by our Senior Communications Officer, Roz Okatan.
Wednesday is our team day in the office and I usually cycle in so I was very pleased that it wasn’t raining this morning! The fresh air always makes me feel good and working in such a lovely location is a good motivation to get on my bike and try to avoid the other cyclists, vans, buses, taxis, scaffolding trucks, Deliveroo riders, cars and electric scooters all heading down Gloucester Road at the same time.
My first meeting of the day is a check-in with my line manager, Amy. Even though we tend to work on separate projects she is always a source of inspiration and motivation and I think we spark each other’s creativity by sharing ideas and collaborating. I do enjoy working from home but there are times when you just can’t beat the in-person interaction. I’m lucky to be part of such an awesome team in BILT!
After that I head to a meeting with the central comms and media teams which is a really good opportunity to share updates and coordinate messaging going on across the University.
As well as working with BILT I am also working on the new Structure of the Academic Year project and my colleagues in the central team have been invaluable in helping get the message out to students and staff about what the changes are and how people will be impacted.
At midday I have my last meeting of the day which is a more focused discussion about communications on the SAY project and how we are going to get very specific messages out to the relevant audiences. This project affects the whole University – staff and students – so there are a lot of people and a lot of detail to consider.
Lunchtime! We set off to Berkeley Square for the Show, Tell and Talk and I was really impressed with how honest, detailed and necessary the conversation was.
I already knew about the excellent Study Skills guidance on student use of AI but, not being a user myself I was surprised by some of the data about the prevalence of AI. There were also some great suggestions about how to manage the use of AI and when to encourage or discourage it.
The afternoon is spent creating some documents, talking about plans for the BILT Conference, preparing some messaging around the nominations for the Bristol Teaching Awards and updating the SAY SharePoint site. The working day flies by and suddenly it’s time to head home. I’m happy to say that the grey clouds turned to blue and I stayed dry!
