 Hi everybody and welcome along to the first episode of UCAT Conference TV, I'm Colm Cronin from the Adventures in Advising podcast and today I am delighted to be joined by the UCAT chair Dave Lofty. Dave how are you doing? I'm good thank you, I'm delighted to be here, thank you for having me. Yeah it only seems like yesterday we were talking about the UCAT festival but we are in conference time we're only a few days away and for delegates looking forward now what can they expect? Well I'm so excited to be back here and as you say it does seem like it's come around quickly but we're falling into conference mode now and I'm delighted to see what's in the conference guide and all the details you have on there. There's a full section on getting the most out of the conference and I'm just really excited to see all the things that you can do. There's an advising hub which personally I found really exciting and it takes me back it's a very retro experience of looking at how you can have that experience online of feeling like you're a conference and that's where I get personally the most value is kind of wandering around kind of talking to people so I think what we've tried to do is replicate that full live experience you'd have at a conference through that through a wide range of engaging sessions where you'll be able to to have chat functions and different ways that you can coordinate and communicate with all of the different delegates. I still believe that the greatest strength that we have as an organisation is the full diversity of the delegates that attend the events that we do and the presenters are fantastic you get lots from them and then you get the discussions that come from it so we've got a wide range of different sessions that are featured in the guide that you can have a look through and see which are the the ones which kind of have your interest and I've been working a lot recently on peer-assisted learning the sections on that and there's loads of different aspects of personal tutoring and academic advising that it's broken down to that people can kind of choose from there's the special interest groups as well that I really want to give a big plug to they've come a long way in the last 12 months and so lots of updates from them and times when you can get involved with that and there's a focus on research on professional development and how you can get involved with wider UCAT things beyond and beyond this period and so lots you can do there and to make sure that you get something tangible from it as a CPD record to take away so yeah so much you can get involved with absolutely and a couple of great keynotes coming up loads great sessions and for anyone out there who wants more information definitely check out the UCAT website you can see the links on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well and the conference hashtag a great few days ahead Dave thanks for joining me to outline what delegates have to look forward to I hope you yourself enjoy the conference and look forward to chatting to you over the days to come very exciting can't wait