in our first year the liberal arts core module
was called from research to policy and that went across the whole year
you work together as a group to research a
aspect a social aspect that you want to build a campaign around
and we got yeah pretty much free reign on what
issue or topic we wanted to engage with in my group did islamophobia
and we looked at kind of reasons why people commit
hate crimes we ended
up focusing on eating disorders and the provision of mental health support
around eating disorders for my group it was the use of single-use plastics and
the environmental impacts of that it was a really interesting project to
get involved with we managed to interview
two MPs MP Jess Philips and Preet Gill as part of the project which was
a really rewarding experience sort of engaging with people who are obviously
yeah, like at the forefront of a lot of these
issues and it was such a great experience it was my first kind of
experience of university group work and I just had a great time with my
group we all got on really well we were all really invested in the projects
we came up with an idea for an app where people would be able to
report hate crimes but also so the idea with the app was like it would
centralize lots of different resources so like
reporting on hate crimes but also receiving support if you've witnessed or
experienced a hate crime being able to yeah learn the skills to
interview people and edit video and create a narrative through
a sort of documentary was just such a great experience and
and it was it felt like such a huge achievement for us it felt really
professional and we worked really hard on it and we
were all really passionate about what we were doing
in my second year I did interdisciplinarity one and two
in the first one we looked at fake news and we
considered it from the point of view of different
various different disciplines and at the end I wrote an essay
on why politicians lie and then in the second half of the
course we did a group project which again we got to
pick the topics and my group did environmental issues on fast fashion
which culminated in me writing an essay on kind of why we have
environmental problems of fast fashion looking at the interplay between
technology and society so coming from the perspectives of chemistry which is
my discipline and then art history which was the
discipline of one of the other members of the group
my group we explored obesity and we basically use different
disciplines to understand the problem and potentially come up with a solution
but it's more problem focused and so we each so we had someone from
gender studies in my group international relations I’m sports science
I think there's someone who's doing languages or philosophy
and but obviously you just use whatever disciplines that you have access to
and you try and combine your perspectives my favourite of the modules
was definitely interdisciplinarity too when we did about fast fashion because
it's a topic that I care about anyway and getting
very different perspectives from different places made it much clearer
why there's a problem
because having come at it from a more scientific problem background it's like
oh we just need to kind of wait for the
technology to come along and fix it but actually
looking at it from other people's perspectives and from other disciplines
perspectives gave me the understanding of kind of
why it's not quite as simple as just come up with a technological solution
and implement that and that will be sorted
and how there's so much more going on which I think is
kind of whines as disciplinarity is so valuable that it
shows you that there's a much deeper understanding of a problem if you look
at it from different points of view difficult to understand other people's
disciplines especially when you haven't learned them at all and
so you know sometimes they'd use language that you hadn't you just didn't
understand and also from your own perspective
trying to explain what you think's basic language
in your discipline to other people so I’d be like
saying something about sports science and my friends would be like cassie I
don't sorry I don't understand that and I was
like oh how do you explain this term so I think that's one of the biggest
challenges especially in interdisciplinary
understandings but it's also really rewarding as well
I think the main thing for me is that the modules have
brought this outside perspective which I think is something that is completely
lacking in a single honours science course
that you just do the subjects and you just learn the content and that's kind
of it and it's given me I feel a much kind of
wider understanding of how of kind of putting the ideas that
we're learning actually in place in the real world in the final
year I also do the entrepreneurial modules
and I found a similar spirit which I think is very land specific that people
do tend to be genuinely invested in the work they're doing
it's something we genuinely care about the first half
is called entrepreneurial skills and the second half is
entrepreneurial start-up and it's a bit more practical
and this module involves group work you're yeah put into groups and given
a sort of prompt and then you essentially have to
devise a whole business idea from this prompt we're working
to create an app which helps to make sport more
inclusive for women and so that's something that we're
all really invested in and you kind of really feel that we're all
working together and working hard to really
yeah, to really work on something that we feel strongly about
yeah, you start with obviously market research sort of looking at your target
market looking at different customers looking at
trends what you know what is profitable at the moment what are the trends in the
business world
and then you yeah come up with a product or a service
over the term and you have to devise a business plan
you also do a business pitch uh to a number of different
sort of entrepreneurship professionals and industry professionals
for me the thing I enjoyed the most on the LANS modules is
the fact that you get to work in these group contests with other line
students everybody's coming at the topic from a different disciplinary
perspective and also people within lands are very
individual they tend to have their own interests beyond their degree as well
and I think that really creates a fun atmosphere really dynamic group where
you can see things slightly differently and I
think as a group you come to conclusions that you maybe
wouldn't have if you're all approaching it from the same discipline