We are now approaching the end of our second week of our Laidlaw first year project, and what an intense and enriching experience it has been! Having spent the majority of our first week back in Oxford restructuring our programme outlines towards our new research-chapter focuses, this week saw us taking greater control over structuring our timetables and, excitingly, beginning our extracurricular delivery in schools. Though this presented its challenges - notably, the struggle of maintaining focus during days of remote working, which took me back to stressful days of pandemic self-guided learning - it also brought the opportunity to pursue sources and articles for our literature review with greater freedom than I have experienced in my degree studies, which was really liberating.

Running our first session at our secondary school was quite daunting, and in many ways was like reliving my first day at secondary school all over again! However, the support from the staff who welcomed us was really reassuring, and made us feel much more ready to get going. Fantastically, we had 13 students (a bumper turnout, given our fears on the commute over that we would be teaching to an empty room!). It was a little difficult engaging the students at the outset, given that they were at the end of a long day and in an unfamiliar environment: however, once we split off into smaller discussion groups to talk about storytelling and the stories that matter to us, we began to build better rapport that carried us through the rest of the session, and hopefully have set the foundations for the coming weeks.

We also continued to refine our research proposal to better fit to our revised focus on the importance of community engagement to the planning and provision of successful extracurricular interventions. Initially, I approached this with a word count-focused mindset that can occasionally creep into social science degree study, worrying that we didn’t have enough words on the page or stylish embellishments: however, following a meeting with our supervisor Sophia, we tightened our focus on quality over quantity and prioritised clarity and concision, I think to the great benefit of the outline. This is a simple but vital lesson, and one that I will definitely try to carry into my approach to university assignments next year.

Finally, an overview of the experience so far would be incomplete without highlighting how wonderful it has been to undertake this project as a part of a community of scholars and supervisors within the university. Approaching a social research project of this nature, which is stretching me far beyond my comfort zone of reading lists and lecture notes, has been made far more manageable by knowing my chapter team of four and the university-wide cohort of 20 are in the same boat, and that we can draw on the experience and support of our supervisors and the Oxford SDG lab. Furthermore, in a direct sense, being able to delegate tasks within our team and share resources, contacts, and articles between teams has greatly streamlined the processes of research design and literature review. One especially memorable moment of group rapport was watching our fabulous programme manager Ruby-Anne take on a formidable looking fairground ride in the pouring rain at our social during the annual St Giles’ Fair… I look forward to seeing what learning the next few weeks of implementation will bring, and what amazing new memories we will make as a cohort!