 Hi everyone and welcome along to another episode of LVSA conference television I'm Colm Cronin from the adventures in advising podcast and today I am delighted to be joined by a repeat visitor dr. Chris Polly Chris. How you doing doing good? Thanks Colm a little bit tired after a busy day, but yeah always great to chat with you Well, I am I'm really intrigued. I want to hear more. Tell me about day one Tell me how did it go and tell me we talked just a couple of days ago about the gather town environment the advising hub I want to hear I want to hear about that Yeah, so day one was was busy as you would expect we had we saw well We think we interacted with almost everyone who's registered with the conference by now, which is great Everyone's got some set up and understands hopefully how to get into the our sessions Which is always a bit of a you know a question mark for technical You know Experiences of our members is not always uniform so trying to get everybody where they need to be is a bit of a challenge and Then we've seen about 50% of our members in gather town at some point today as well we had our poster session and We also spotted a bunch of people just having an explore getting to know the space and the really nice thing about gather town is Is you can't see everybody all of the time, but as you walk past a group of people you can see that they're chatting You can't hear what they're saying, but it gives you a little animation, which is just you know, it's so Yeah, it's so cuz I like as we would say in in Dutch, right? It's so cozy to make to know that there's people they're having an in-depth conversation About the conference and what's going on, which I think it's just it just gives the whole place a really nice feel Yeah, because that's exactly what you see at Any in conference that you go to in person as you see groups of people having conversations And you don't know what they're conversing about but you could see people interacting So it's great to hear that that is Working well in in the advising hub and I think as probably more people come in from you the UCAT side tomorrow It will just continue to grow and expand So we have just finished day one, but what what else is in store over the coming days? Yeah, so the program as we talked about earlier in the week is is pretty diverse, but it's also Empty ish so we recognize that the you know, people are mostly working from home. There's still kids in the background So at a low pace we we have a bunch of events now Which which really focus on the connection between UCAT and LVSA so we have a couple of nice sessions planned one on Thursday With Eve and Melissa E from from to you Eindhoven and Melissa from Sheffield And they're really going to discuss with the advisors who go there about what what now have we learned after a year of this This bizarre situation. What can we what can we keep and what can we throw away? And I think that's a really interesting conversation We were really mindful when we were designing the program like how much do you talk about the pandemic? How much do you give people a break? But I think in this flavor, maybe we give people the best of that without dwelling too much on the negative side So I'm really interested to see that conversation and really actually bring the voices of the participants together Because yeah, that's that's the whole point of calibrating Tomorrow we've also got the the big annual meeting of LVSA So there there'll be conversations with the board of the of the organization setting the vision for the future about what what the organization will do And maybe some of the ideas and some of the inspiration will come from the members about their experiences from this week And and what they want to see LVSA doing and more in 2021 and 2022 Fantastic. Yeah, the Melissa and Eve's session I've spoken about it sounds like it's going to be fantastic And kind of a lovely follow-on to that UCAT LVSA crossover event in December as well. So it's all coming together and Chris I want to thank you for taking the time to chat to me this this was Unscheduled when we initially put the list together, but Chris very kindly Agree to jump on and talk about the first day and for people who are looking for for more Information on either the the UCAT side of things or the the LVSA you can see they're the conference hashtags the Twitter accounts the Facebook pages you can see the LinkedIn group So please do keep the conversations going and get involved in the advising hub on gather town Chris I want to wish you the best for the rest of the conference I hope it continues to be as busy and as productive as day one has been and I look forward to it getting the opportunity to get Into the advising hub and chat to people there myself. Yeah, see you around. Thanks for the chat