 Hi everyone and welcome along to Ucat LVSA crossover combination amalgamation looking forward to to this I'm Colom Cronan from the adventures in advising podcast and today I am delighted to be joined by a group of wonderfully talented people from across the the continent I think we're in three different countries currently so and Iris and Chris welcome how are you all doing. I'm doing great thanks Colom and thanks for having us here. Great stuff. We might give the viewers an opportunity to get to know each of you so and we might start with you maybe you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're working. Yeah sure so most people will know me from Ucat because I'm the Vice Chair of the community engagement team, which is a really really exciting role. I'm based in the UK and I currently work at the University of Southampton, and I'm a teaching fellow, a senior teaching fellow at the University of Southampton and responsible for developing and coordinating the personal academic tutoring program that we run there. Very good and Iris what about you. Yeah my name is Iris Berks I work for Maastricht University at the campus in Vendor and I coordinate the Office of Academic and Student Advising. And yeah for the first part of this year we've been organizing this conference and I've been part of this delightful group of people to organize this conference so I'm very excited to actually start it next week. Very good and Chris you're very welcome. Thanks. Yeah I agree Iris I'm very much looking forward to the doors opening and the people walking in virtually so to say. But my name is Chris I'm a bit of a crossover so I'm British originally but now I work in Maastricht as well. And I'm the coordinator of academic advising at the Maastricht Science Programme and I'm also teaching physics classes for most of my work. And I've been here for eight years but before that I was in the UK doing my PhD there. Fantastic as I said three very talented people and we are going to delve into to the conference that there is lots to look forward to but I suppose one of the things that we certainly we're going to discuss is the gather town platform. Maybe for viewers who are not familiar with this don't have a clue what gather town is who does somebody want to tell me a little bit more about it and what it's going to mean in terms of conference attendees. Yeah so so gather town is our online advising hub we call it the advising hub for easy reference. And it is a virtual meeting ground we've created a building in which people can walk around meet with each other and have hopefully stimulating an interesting conversations with each other. And we will be there as UCAT and LVSA together at the same time. So that means that you'll bump into people from your own side of the pond but also you can cross the channel literally we have a channel on the advising hub and you can cross it and meet people who have a slightly different context in advising than you do but therefore probably bring new and exciting ideas to your advising context. Yeah and I suppose I have I've seen the platform and use it a couple of times and for for viewers who are unfamiliar. This is how I think gather town advertises themselves for those who who missed the camaraderie and spontaneous hallway conversations and chats, and you can design your own and iris you very kindly shared a screenshot of what attendees can expect. When they enter into the UCAT LVSA gather town lounge. Yeah, you're right now you're in our social lounge or our networking hub. You can sit on a couch where you can have lunch at a table. If you see our avatars in the middle of the screen, you will find this at the fireplace. So the nice thing is you virtually walk around in this environment. So in the middle you see avatars and by means of those avatars you you move around in the space. And on the top of the screen you also see our video connection because we are close in this this shot. Our video connection has has appeared but as you can see there are more people in this environment at the same time. And you can see on the left there are more people in the advising hub at the same time. But you don't see their screen because they're not close to us at the moment. So you can actually have a private conversation with someone close to you. And Chris I'm going to pick on you a little bit because we saw your picture there. So obviously you have tested this. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with it? Yeah so I think it really brings back that feel of sort of spontaneity of you know literally whizzing past somebody in the hallway on the way to a session. And oh it's Dave I saw him last year or you know oh that's that's a person who I you know want to catch up about their their recent trip for obviously no trips at the moment. But you know to get back that to get back that sense of you know just that casual conversation as I said. And I think for for us the reason that we went down this path is also to give people a way to not just be in another zoom environment because I think we've had a lot of that in the last year. I think collectively in academia and probably the wider world and I think to just have a place of yeah a little bit less formality a bit more fun and a little bit of yeah just see what happens. Maybe it'll be a disaster but I think we've given people a chance to get to meet each other and see how things go. I think I don't think it'll be a disaster at all and how exciting is it that this is going to allow I suppose delegates from both UK and LBSA to gather and chat together. This is amazing and this is really really exciting. We were talking about this earlier with Chris and Iris because normally if if you've got two organizations who normally attend each other's conferences and they're happening at the same time. The advantage of this sort of online environment if you like is now we can share sessions we've got sessions that are open to both groups we can go and talk to each other, which wouldn't be what you wouldn't be able to do in real life. I'm just you know some LBSR in the Netherlands and we're over here now conferences are happening at the same time. So it's really really exciting because I'm going to be wandering around our gather town building our venue and I'll be able to bump into Iris and say come on. Let's go to UCATS coffee lounge. Let's go to the bar and have a virtual coffee. And the other thing we can do that we couldn't do last year online because we just didn't have that same feel I don't think we're as geared up for it as we are this year. We've got virtual sponsorship booths so you can actually go in visit talk to engage with our sponsors and we've got our shall I tell people we've got. If you wander around the venue, especially if you go to the maze, you'll find little virtual Easter eggs. If you find an Easter egg and take it to the sponsor desk, they'll probably send you a little Easter treat in the post. Look at that. So a sneak peek of what people can can expect. So there it's not only that you're going to get wonderful information from the conference sessions, but there are some games and gamification built into this as well which is really great to hear. And I know that another part of this and the I have a slide for the you for the UCATS side of the house in terms of where people can get information and you can see the conference hashtag, but not to to leave LVSA out. Iris, you, you were tweeting just today from a new Twitter account set up for the conference. Yes, we have a Twitter account for the conference called at LVSA 2021 and the same works for the hashtag. So if you use those, we will accumulate that and and also share across the pond. So we will follow very closely the UCAT hashtag as well. And we've also set up a LinkedIn group for all participants where they can can share their connections with each other. Brilliant that I that I was I wasn't aware of that. So this is really this is really good info for me as well. And so something that can serve. Ah, that this is where it should be. Chris, for you, is there anything in particular you're looking forward to at the conference this week? Yeah, I mean, we were just saying like we're looking forward to normality. And I think, you know, this is this is almost a bit of a break for some of us and just a chance to maybe turn the email off for a few days, maybe not answer everything. Immediately put an away message in MS teams and embrace a little bit the, you know, the trips to the conferences that we are used to doing. Of course, you know, there will still be the cat that needs feeding and the kids who need entertaining as well. But I think in both conferences, we've sort of been mindful of that. But just a little bit of a break from the normal and also to hear about the interesting work that people have been doing because I think we all know that advising didn't stop when the pandemic hit. In fact, it probably got it probably got harder for many people. We've got more intense, more challenging. And, you know, some of the topics in the conferences will definitely address some of the innovations, some of the lessons learned, and especially about what we might do in the future. Now we're looking at this from the from the other side. Absolutely. And I think looking at the schedules for both conferences, there are some amazing sessions, some wonderful keynote speakers. So there are a whole host of things to look forward to. I want to thank the three of you for taking the time to talk to me about the the gather town platform, which sounds like it is going to allow for that kind of more spontaneous interaction, which is something that I think we've really missed. Like the virtual environment has been great in terms of the information you can get, but that social side of things has suffered. So looking forward to to really embracing that over the next week. So, and Iris and Chris, thank you very much for taking the time to chat to me today. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to see you again.