 Hi everybody and welcome along to another episode of UCAT Conference TV. I'm Column Cronin from the Adventures in Advising podcast and today I am delighted to be joined by the closing keynote speaker, Diane Knott. Diane, how are you doing? Very well. Thank you. How are you? Very well. It is lovely and sunny here in Dublin, which is always a welcome development. So I'm looking forward to getting the opportunity to chat to you, learn a little bit more about you and hear about what we can look forward to in the closing keynote. So maybe for viewers who aren't that familiar with your work, can you talk to us a little bit about your background and your work? Yeah, of course, yeah. I sometimes feel like I have two heads. One of them is really a head full of first year experience. I'll say a bit more about that in a minute. And the other is a head full of academic staff development. And the two heads come together in lots of different work that I do, but are often quite separate. So I do a lot of work supporting academic staff with their career development and in particular with their recognition and fellowship and awards and working towards prizes and awards. I do a lot of that kind of work. And I've been doing that for quite a lot of years. My background, I was an educational developer. And I worked at the University of Teeside a lot of years ago, but I've been independent for quite a long time. And that's kind of much of my sort of everyday day job is supporting staff to think about where they're going with their careers and think about how they develop themselves as teachers, as researchers, as learners really. But the other part of my world, if you like, the other part, the other head that I have, like Bebelbrox or whatever is known was from Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, I have two heads. So the other head is the head that's the fun side of what I do really, which is think about and design ideas for and support student first year experience. And I'm interested not just really in the first year, but in the way the first year sets students off for their journey, for their career, right through university and beyond. For me, that first year is first of everything. It's where they start to really establish who they're going to be, what they're going to learn and what their academic journey will be like. So I'm absolutely passionate about that first year of students experience, but also how it feeds into the rest of their journey. So I guess more important to me than a lot of other things is student transitions. And it is partly student transitions that I'm going to speak about at the conference. I'm very committed to thinking about how all of us can support student transitions effectively. And my session will be thinking about that. So I set up a first year experience network and conference about 12 years ago, it's probably a little longer than that now, but it only feels like two years ago. And I work with a lot of people across Europe to think about first year students, to think about transitions. I have been doing that and involved in that in a variety of different ways. I've done a bit of writing about it, but my main interest is support others who support first years. So I work a lot with institutions and individuals to think about making students first year experience the best it can possibly be, the best beginning it can be. Really interesting. Yeah, I love the variety and I'm fascinated when I talk to people both during for UK conference TV and also in the podcast that I host, we always talk about people's backgrounds just to get a sense because there's such a diversity in higher ed of people coming in from different places. And it's great because it brings in different ideas. And certainly in terms of transitions and first year experience, I think a timely topic, what we're facing in September, I suppose, still a little bit unknown, but we could potentially have two cohorts of students who in the true first years and in our second years who in some institutions would never have been on campus. So you'll have two cohorts who are coming to campus for the first time, but in different stages. So lots to think about for those planning that and I suppose then, you know, as we turn towards that aspect of it and thinking about your your closing keynote, what is it I suppose, what are some of some of the themes give us a peek behind the curtain at what delegates can look forward to. My session title is projects of hope approaches to student transition. And it's called that because over the last two or three years, before COVID actually, but it's been really strengthened for me through this kind of unbelievably strange period of time. I've been interested in how institutions and individuals who work in institutions develop practices which support students but which are in my kind of understanding of them projects of hope. So there are activities that are about encouraging students to imagine beyond themselves and to reach beyond where they've come from and create an environment where they really start to imagine what the future might be like for them and for the world around them. And I'm really interested in the way in which many staff bring to students a real sense of adventure and excitement and hope for the future. And I think in this particular time thinking about how we can support students to connect with hope, to connect with opportunity, to connect with imagination and to connect with the world that they're in, but in a positive frame, it is actually vital. I'm really interested in the sense of how we can engage them as as individuals as through academic advising, but also as teachers and also as staff working in professional services in universities. All of us have a relationship with our students that is strong or weak, large or small, but is significant to that student journey and how we then invest in that and how we develop practices that support students to really get that sense of hopefulness and joy and opportunity. That doesn't mean there won't be challenges, that doesn't mean there won't be fear, that doesn't mean that it won't be difficult, but your comment about two lots of students who are both effectively first on campus, even if some of them are technically second years and are coming into a university that they may not know very well or into labs they haven't been in before. In many ways, you're exactly right. So the material about first-year experience, the strategies that support first-year students are actually vital to all our students. I could go on, but I probably shouldn't, otherwise I wouldn't say when it comes to speech. I would love you to go on and I'm fascinated. You have me wishing it was Thursday already, so you have done a good job of captivating me and I'm sure the viewers and I think we will have a lot to look forward to. I want to wish you all the best for the closing keynote and continued success in your career and just thank you very much for taking the time to join me today. Thank you for talking to me, interviewing me. It's been very jolly. It's nice to meet you.