As my university showcase was the other day I thought I may as well write a wee post about it, plus a bit about my dissertation for anyone interested in reading it.

Showcase

Overall I think that my showcase was fairly poor, very few people turned up (possibly just in double digits – but most of them were from the uni already, the amount of people from outwith the uni was definitely single digits) but by no fault of mine or the lecturers who organised it from my course.

I think the main problem was the time that we were given to do it (2PM – 4PM), but there were a bunch of factors that caused it to be a failure, including:

1. The time slot (2PM – 4PM)
2. The amount of people from my class that showed up (3 out of around 15)
3. The fact it wasn’t assessed (caused many people not to care and resulted in the above)
4. The location (in the uni – 4th floor, away from most of the other showcases

How can they make it better?

In short, by fixing the above problems. In length:

Put it on in the evening

This is the main reason a lot of the class didn’t turn up, and also the reason that there wasn’t many visitors to the showcase. People have jobs that they probably don’t want to take a day off to go to a graduate showcase, especially those from the industry that the showcase was aimed at attracting. I appreciate that the lecturers at the university that set it up probably don’t want to be there in the evening after working there the whole day, but it’s one day out of the year.

Get the students to organise it

Make it mandatory for the students to organise it and attend it. This would solve the problem of only 3 people out of 15-20 students in my class showing up, it would also remove the workload of organising the showcase from the lecturers (which they would probably be happy about). The students would probably be happier about attending too, as they have organised it.

Okay, so the head of my course tried to get some of us to help pitch ideas of what we could do for the showcase, but usually it was at times when nobody on the course was wanting to think about the showcase – the start of the year, and coursework/dissertation hand in week were two of the times we were asked.

I think the best way to do it would be to have each course hold meetings about it (even if it’s only 3 or 4 throughout the year), getting ideas or whatever. Then one or two people from each course would act as representatives to relay the ideas to the rest of the courses in the showcase (at a different meeting) – a bit like how the student representatives work at the moment with telling the lecturers about what was good or bad on the course that semester. If it was assessed then I don’t think it would be that hard to get the students to do.

Have all the showcases in the same area

At the showcase all the individual courses had separate rooms throughout the uni to hold their showcase in – this was obviously a bad idea. For a start the rooms were spread around from the 2nd floor up to the 4th floor, and people just coming to see one or two course’s showcases weren’t going to walk upstairs, or even down the hall to a separate room to see another showcase, whereas if the showcases were all in the same area (e.g. Whitespace) then people would be more inclined to go round the whole thing. Also, whitespace is on the ground floor, much more convenient than the 4th.

Dissertation

I also had my dissertation finished, bound and handed in this week:

So hopefully I will get a good mark for that (as I did put a lot of work into it). The project side of things can be seen in last weeks post: Dissertation Project Completed.

If you would like to read the dissertation then feel free to download this PDF of it and have a read. I can’t say it will be that interesting to anyone who isn’t already interested in the subject, but feel free.

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