It sounds almost like a riddle…
All students will go through it;
They are all heading in the same direction;
But there isn’t a ‘right’ way to navigate it… what is it?
It is, of course, the ever-perpetual issue of ‘transition’. And not just the transition into university, which has been widely researched and written about, but transitions throughout university.
In February 2025, Fiona Hartley and I started a three-year project that wanted to explore exactly this: what are the key moments in a student’s journey through university?
What concerns do they have when going from first to second year?
At what point do they start prioritising assessments over attendance?
At what point do concerns about careers and their future really kick in?
And, most importantly:
What interventions can we put in place to make these moments smoother and best help students during these moments?
We recruited 36 first-year undergraduate students to join us for a longitudinal study to share their experiences with us through their degree. We have met with the students every six months since February 2025 to hear about how things are going, whether they feel a part of the university, how they are findings their degree and assessments and where they feel their support is coming from.
We know there is so much work going on around the university and beyond about student transitions. So, the aim of this series is two-fold; its primary aim is to share the findings of our research so far in the hope that you, the reader, implement some of the interventions we have co-designed with the students and two: to find out more from colleagues about the work they are doing within this area, to compare their students’ experiences and to see if we can come up with a universal set of best practices that will work for many of our students (may be dreaming big here).
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing the findings from each stage of our students’ journeys so far and the interventions we feel could really help your students at that stage. We’d love to hear from you about whether you think this would resonate with your students, if you have suggestions for other ideas and whether you have found similar (or different!) things with your students.
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