Thank you Annie for a great Flinders week together. Hope your trip home was easy peasy. See you later this week!
I´ve had three more days in this relaxed corner of the world. It´s Monday late afternoon which means that you guys back at Malmö University could be having your morning fika right now. In an hour I´m starting my journey back home. I´m really going to miss my new colleagues from Flinders but fortunately some of them are coming to Malmö University in the beginning of February. Looking forward to that!
Today I got to talk to several people, beginning with a morning meeting with Verity starting the plans for her visit to Malmö University. Preliminary the dates for her visit are now set and she´ll come early February. Around these days she will of course visit friends in England and Denmark as well as go up north to see the northern lights. Why not, everything is just so close!
During her visit to Mah she will do a workshop together with Susanne Schech, teacher from the School of History and International Relations at Flinders University. Susanne will also visit Malmö University, at the same time as Verity, within this Erasmus + project. They will show how they work together, professionals and academics. Veritys goal is to make students reflect on what they learn and how they can use that ahead, bulk up their skills and move forwards, towards work.
Of to the next meeting with Natalia Hutton (Admissions Manager), and Jarrad Benson (Team Leader for the Perspective Students Team). Natalias team have completely different work tasks compared to the Admissions office at Malmö University. At Flinders these 8-9 people work a lot like our Education Coordinators/Study Coordinators at the faculties/departments at Malmö University! But for the whole university, central. Jarrads team of 6 people mainly work with recruitment and prospective students. They organise visits from school classes. Pupils from the age of 13 and up can come visit Flinders and Annie and I saw many school classes in different ages, in their school uniforms, visiting Flinders during our week here. Jarrad and his team also visit as many schools as they can during the year, as well as organising special days on campus for special groups, for instance parents or study advisers. To be able to manage all of this, a whole lot of their work are done by student ambassadors.
Before lunch I had time to meet Jacqui Forte, Student Program Advisor at the School of History & International Relations. She works quite similar to many of the subject advisors at the departments at Lund University. She assists current and future students with their study plans and enrolment, to ensure they manage their studies, which also includes quite a lot of administration although the department of course has administrators as well. Like in my job students come to her with questions high and low.
A big deferens between my expertise and all of the work carried out here is that longer individual study- and career counselling sessions does not seem to occur at Flinders. As always when I try to figure out why Flinders and Malmö University are organized so differently it boils down to that at Flinders students pay for their education, and also there’s obvious competition between the 3-4 universities in South Australia. Various global and Australian ranking lists are extremely important, like the national one measuring employment rate 3 months, one year and three years after education.
Late lunch and final meeting with Verity and her boss Nina. Mainly we talked about how we can work together in the long run, despite time difference and long distances. We will try to do long distance workshops for each other’s students and see how that works out.
And now, a couple of last pictures of the great campus of Flinders University…
