Undergraduate, Postgraduate, General Course, and PhD students packed The Venue on Wednesday 13 February 2019 to listen to Director Minouche Shafik and Pro-Director (Education) Dilly Fung speak about the new LSE 2030 strategy.
Following her address, students then had the opportunity to voice their opinions and offer comments, concerns, and questions regarding any aspect of LSE for Minouche to speak about. Here’s what was covered during the hour-and-a-half long event.
New School Strategy
The context in which we live is changing - how are we going to change LSE to keep up? This is the question Minouche and the rest of LSE are trying to answer to keep LSE ahead of the curve. To guide future developments, Minouche posed three questions that LSE aims to answer as they foster improvements throughout the university:
1. How are world changes, such as geopolitics, capitalism, and automation, going to affect students both during their studies and once they graduate?
2. What is the job market going to look like with these world changes, and how will LSE be able to prepare you for these changes?
3. How are we going to “robot-proof” an LSE education?
LSE is constantly reviewing its degrees to put more of the student’s voice into their education hoping to get rid of “check-the-box” degrees and allow students to have agency in their own course, to create a more holistic degree experience.
This includes involving students directly in LSE research, and integrating student voice into more projects like Change Makers. Summative assignments should produce work that can be shown and shared, and ideas such as a collaborative podcast that could be streamed were mentioned as an example to replace a traditional summative assessment.
During the forum, students were able to speak their voice and two common themes arose from the audience: mental health and academic concerns.
Mental Health at LSE
Students mentioned the issue of mental health at LSE and the need for more on-campus resources to help them. Students also noted that they feel their academic mentors are not currently receiving enough training to help students deal with the associated academic pressures.
Several students noted how they feel disconnected from the university once they move out of university halls and because of the limited number of hours they are required to spend on campus.
Minouche agreed with students saying the mental health resources at LSE needed to continue to evolve to meet students' needs. Minouche also took student advice that an outside representative should be used to evaluate services.
Student mental health and wellbeing is a key priority for our School, and Dilly Fung, Pro-Director (Education) stated she would like to collaborate with all students to design and deliver a framework that supports the entire student community.
If you are interested in sharing your ideas about how we can support mental health and wellbeing, please get in touch. All students are invited to be involved and the Students’ Union is also contributing.
Academic Life at LSE
Students mentioned they would like more academic support on campus and more comprehensive resources when selecting courses. Multiple students on combined degree programmes said they would like to see more integrated academic advising on their course with support across all their involved departments instead of just one.
Dilly responded noting how some courses have video previews and that plans are in place for more videos to be developed and agreed that students on combined degrees should have academic support across all disciplines.
After a lengthy discussion about everything from the Student Hub to the new Centre Buildings, Minouche and Dilly thanked students for their time. Students were also invited to share any other questions and feedback using Comments, Compliments and Concerns cards which would be passed directly to Minouche and her team to be answered and taken into consideration.
Written by LSE Social Media Ambassador Taylor Long
Mental Health support at LSE
Academic support at LSE