Supportive Campus Leaves No One Behind

The Finnish Student Health Service (FSHS) has a commitment to promote the health and wellbeing of students and help them maintain their ability to cope with the demands of studying at the university. The majority of first-year students adjust to their new environment with relative ease, but research results have demonstrated that one third of students do not feel that they are a part of any peer group. A lack of social relationships may not only cause emotional distress but also hinder academic progress in the long run. Supportive Campus Community -project was started in February 2015 with a goal of promoting community spirit among students.

The project kicked off at the New Factory premises on February 10th where we were informed about the process of carrying out this project and also met with the team for the first time. The team consists of 5 students and is international with Finnish, Russian and Spanish nationalities represented. Our working language is English, which brings on the challenge of communicating and getting our points and knowledge across. But I have to say that so far there has been no problems in understanding each others and everyone's in with an awesome attitude and really wanting to make a difference and obtaining some concrete results from the project.

The Dream Team

Next we met with the team the following week just to hang out and getting to know each others, talk about the project and to do some brainstorming. We wanted to be ready for our first meeting with our project partner, which unfortunately then had to be cancelled due to financial challenges and postponed to the near future. Despite of the unexpected changes, we kept our spirit high and went on with the planning. We all believe this project is important enough to get the funding and it will happen, so we are moving forward with full speed.

Brainstorming

The next step was to participate in Demola Jam on 21st of February. The purpose of the Jam was to give the project a push forward with some planning, pitching, demonstrations and feedback. Despite the fact that we hadn't met with our project partner, we wanted to get most out of the long day and designed a prototype of the Supportive Campus.

Building in progress

Supportive Campus - prototype

We had so much fun designing, building and spending time in a very international and warm atmosphere. The idea was to create the prototype and pitch the project in small teams. We got really good feedback from the demonstrations, mostly in a form of very good questions. Questions like: What kind of community we want to build? Define communality. What is the difference to what is already there? How can one find a peer?

The questions led us eventually to a conclusion that at the moment maybe we shouldn't concentrate so much on the end result than to research communality and how to build it, find out what are the problems we are facing at our campuses, what are the reasons some students are not integrating, how to bring so many different kinds of people together etc. So we decided our next step is to get as much information on the subject as possible and trust that eventually it will lead us to the best solutions and practices and activities to build a Supportive Campus that leaves No One behind.

This weeks working hours: Aku 12,5, Johanna 12, Helen 12, Tatiana 12, Andres 12.