College News

QE Students Design their own Work Experience Placement

Eight students from QE have participated in an exciting work experience placement with Durham University that they themselves helped to design. Working with the University’s Libraries and Collections Team and Learning and Engagement Team during lockdown, the group completed consultations and surveys, offering their opinions and feedback as part of a steering committee set up to form the basis of the online work experience programme. Following this, the students took part in the placement during which they undertook tasks to support the work of the Libraries, including cataloguing, and heard from different professionals about the routes they took to pursue their chosen careers.

Rachel Barclay, Curator of the Oriental Museum, explains: ‘We intend to use the work carried out by the students to check and revise the gallery text for the MacDonald Gallery to ensure that it is accessible to a wide audience as well as specialists’. Jonathan Bush, Archivist, comments: ‘I’m incredibly grateful to all of the students who really worked hard in cataloguing the Watson Papers. We can now make this collection discoverable to researchers across the world’.

A representative from the Library and Collections Team adds: ‘We cannot thank the students enough for their thoughts and reflections; we have found them invaluable. In this way alone, they have contributed enormously to the development of a programme that the University will be running for many years’.

For full details about the College’s work experience programme, please contact Sarah Griffiths (sgriffiths@qeliz.ac.uk), Work Experience Co-ordinator.