Just starting Uni? Here’s one role that will make you feel at home

This article was written by Film BA(Hons) student Alexander.

If you’re reading this blog, you are most likely just starting University. No matter your personal situation such as your age or background, starting University can be nerve wracking and challenging.

As an international student, I arrived quite worried about whether I would fit into the local culture and be accepted by the others around me. I was also stressed about potentially not being able to adapt easily. All of these fears quickly started to fade away though once I arrived and started immersing myself into the University. There were many factors that played a part in my ability to slowly feel at home in Falmouth, but today I will be writing about a specific aspect of my journey that greatly helped me, in the hope to shed some light on it and discuss some of its less spoken about benefits. I am talking about the Student Ambassador job position. 

There are naturally many obvious and often discussed benefits to having this position, such as having a source of income, it being a great way to buff up your portfolio, the ability to develop and improve certain skillsets, it being an 0 hour contract meaning you can fit the job around your schedule as much as you want, and much more (it becomes even more tailored to your skills and time when you start being able to apply for the special promotions such as digital or equity ambassador). But, I want to use this blog to discuss other benefits not often discussed, benefits that can prove especially helpful to new students. 

As a Student Ambassador, part of the job requires you to be trained and capable of providing tours of your campus and department (and if you become a senior ambassador, potentially tours of other departments and the other campus). This allows you to gain significantly more knowledge of not just your course and others, but also an in depth understanding of your entire campus and all the facilities you have access to. As a new student, this can be incredibly useful to clear up any confusions you may have of the environment you’ll be spending the next few years in.

Another huge part of the ambassador job that isn’t discussed as much is the ambassador community, this community creates so many advantages and opportunities for new students. The ambassador community is genuinely very kind. It’s a community built on supporting one another, helping each other out and often working very closely together. An obvious advantage of a community like this for new students is that it allows you to meet lots of people outside your usual circles and groups, in order to make all sorts of different friends. Meeting people from all over the uni is also fantastic for networking, since it connects you with artists and more from so many different domains that you might not have normally met, and if you ever need the help from someone within that domain, you now have a connection.