Behind the scenes of the ChemStudent Awards 2020
Meet the Department Student experience 9th September 2020
On Monday 7th September, ChemSoc and the Chemistry PASS Scheme created the ChemStudent awards. The awards are entirely student led, so we asked Charlotte, who presented the awards, for an exclusive insight into the way they worked.
Have you ever been in a meeting and someone pipes up with an idea that at first sounds great then when you think about it more you think ‘I’m not so sure’? Well ironically the student panel awards started like that!
One of our PASS coordinators had the idea of giving awards to our lecturers to recognise all the hard work they’ve been doing, particularly in light of COVID-19. Of course this sounds like a wonderful idea when you think of an award ceremony; everyone gathers in the lecture hall and we have a pile of envelopes with the names of the winners stuffed inside… except of course, we can’t do that!! So Dukula, our guy in PASS who thought this up starts off by circulating some awards, asking students by email to submit nominations. We got some really good responses too; of course we all have our favourites – yes even I, the diversity and inclusion officer have a few people I’d love to give all the awards to… for shame Charlotte!
Developing the plan
As time marched on we started to find the gaps in the plan, see, we had this list of awards but there seemed like there was an awful lot and a few of us in the ChemSoc committee were a bit worried about them; What if they came off as patronising? What if we couldn’t work out how to pick proper winners? When, where and how would we actually present these awards? So myself and Elena (our education officer) had a read through the awards and we started to realise that our fears were unfounded; Dukula had written some wonderful awards and there were plenty of nominations to choose from.
Choosing the winners
We had a lot of fun choosing the winners – on a zoom call I brought up the nominations and we all cast our votes for whom we felt was most deserving based on the nominations… OMG you have no idea how hard it is to set aside your personal favourites.
You see the names of faculty with whom you have formed good relationships with during your time at uni and you think “well obviously they deserve this award because I like them best”.
Presenting the awards
As we started talking about the format for the presentation, I had an idea of how it would look and I knew my way around some simple editing software… so I volunteered to do it. Of course like so many good ideas, once you’ve agreed you then have to get into the details. My biggest thing was ‘how do I make this entertaining?’, the problem is that since I’ll be sitting on my own in our home office, there aren’t many ways to make it entertaining.
In the end I settled on a running joke that I would ‘read’ the nominations from text books… nothing too silly which would lower the tone of the video and I would wrap it up with a short blooper reel. This gave us a smart and respectful video with just enough humour to keep it light and enjoyable. The feedback from the faculty was wonderful and can be summed up with this line from one of the emails; “[The awards] have given a huge boost to the people in Chemistry!”
It’s nice to know we made a difference 🙂
You can watch the ceremony on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzkeolRT37c
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