Author: Petr Kaftan

Final Week at The Brilliant Club

On the Monday of my fourth week at The Brilliant Club, the organisation held a Mid-term review. The entire team of approximately 60 people gathered in a single conference room and each department (Finance, Operations, Evaluation etc.) held a brief presentation to communicate their work and its outcomes to other departments. This was a unique experience in that it helped me complete my picture of how the entire organisation functioned and how different departments complement each other.

I had two major tasks to complete throughout this last week: to conduct interviews with former tutors from The Scholar’s Programme which I had scheduled in the previous week and to write up the report for the 2016 London Provider Feedback Survey according to the organisation’s brand and style guidelines.

Conducting interviews was a completely new experience – for the first time, I found myself on the other side of the barrier. I was surprised to find out just how much time an interviewer must put into the preparation of the interview so that he or she is not caught off track by the interviewee. Before my very first interview, I practised talking through the introductory information that I would communicate to the interviewee before proceeding with the interview itself; I also practised the interview questions themselves. Even then, in the middle of the first interview, when there was pressure on me to ask questions smoothly one after the other to give the impression that I have the interview under control, at one moment I panicked and briefly lost track of my thoughts. However, after this first time, the flow of all subsequent interviews was perfect. The former tutors expressed a variety of opinions on issues such as whether their experience at TBC had any impact on them applying for their current position or whether their experience at TBC is in anyway useful on their current position. My initial plan was to tape-record all interviews and transcribe the responses but this would have been far too time-consuming and, given the circumstances, unrealistic. I therefore took notes throughout each interview and then transcribed them into a table. Unfortunately, given that I started this project during in my 3rd week, I would not have time to process the answers in any way. However, I did submit all the recorded responses to TBC for them to process.

In between my interviews, I worked on the report. I read the organisation’s brand guidelines handbook to understand how branded documents are put together. I also read through the organisation’s style guidelines to understand how to write about sensitive issues. For example, the organisation prefers the term ‘under-represented groups’ rather than ‘disadvantages groups’, ‘high-performing’ rather than ‘smart’ or ‘bright’ (as the latter two are not quantifiable), and ‘highly-selective universities’ rather than ‘elite’ or ‘prestigious’. In the previous week, I produced various figures to visualise the survey data, this week I wrote down findings and recommendations. For example, it turned out that some project providers would like to have access to more guidance material as to how to best supervise the student throughout the placement and also see some more personal development training for the students prior to the start of their placement. On the last day of my placement, I submitted the work to my supervisor, shook hands with everyone to say goodbye, received The Brilliant Club mug as a gift and that was it!

Third Week at The Brilliant Club: A New Project

At the start of my third week at The Brilliant Club (TBC), I learnt that I would not be able to interview project providers on The Nuffield Programme. The reason for this was most that although the Nuffield Research Placement scheme is run by TBC, it is funded by the Nuffield Foundation who did not approve of the project. This came as a slight shock because it meant that a significant part of the work I had done over the course of the past two weeks could not be used. However, there was fortunately a second option – I could quickly set up a different interview project where I would be to apply all of my recently acquired knowledge about the science of a research interview.

My new research project would be based on The Scholars Programme (TSP). TSP recruits, trains and employs PhD tutors to deliver university-style tutorials to small groups of pupils at elementary and secondary schools. The subjects of the research would be former tutors from TSP. The research, in the broadest terms, would investigate the impact of the tutors’ experience at TBC on their future career. It would seek to find out which, if any, parts of their tutoring experience were beneficial to their future job application, and whether, if at all, had the time at TBC helped them to accelerate their career growth. The research, other than that it would provide destination data about TBC’s ex-employees, would serve as a baseline for the improvement of propagation material for the recruitment and retention of tutors.

This new research project was delegated to me by TBC’s Midlands & Southwest regional director who also sent me a list of about 30 e-mail addresses of TBC’s former tutors who stated in an exit survey that they are happy to remain in touch with TBC. Just as I had done for my first project, I drafted a research description, a series of questions to be asked, and an informative e-mail for my potential interviewees. Given that TSP is TBC’s internal programme, there was no need to wait for any confirmation and once the above-mentioned documents were approved by my supervisor, I began contacting tutors almost immediately. Out of the 30, 8 responded and said they would be willing to take part in the interview. I received these responses throughout the week and therefore scheduled all interviews for the following, fourth, week.

During my third week at TBC, I also began working more intensively on the ‘2016 London Provider Feedback Survey’. As mentioned in my previous post, this survey was completed by previous year’s project providers on the Nuffield Research Placement scheme and my task was to summarize the data from the survey and come up with recommendations. The survey was completed by approximately 50 respondents from the Greater London & Surrey area and asked 4 principal types of questions: i) Yes-No-Maybe, ii) Select from the following, iii) Strongly Agree – Agree – Neither – Disagree – Strongly Disagree, and iv) Open-Ended Answer.  I tallied all responses and transferred all data to relevant figures: pie charts, bar graphs, doughnut charts etc. I completed all the necessary data processing during this week and planned the report writing for the next.

Throughout all this time, my responsibility still was to scout for new contacts at London’s universities/research institutes and send out e-mails. The response rate was still very low but every new project provider recruited meant that one or more students could now have a life-changing experience, which is what kept me motivated to carry on working on this otherwise rather dull task.

 

First Two Weeks at The Brilliant Club: The First Project

My Charity Insights internship is at The Brilliant Club – a charity that aims to increase the number of students from under-represented backgrounds at highly-selective universities in the United Kingdom. The Brilliant Club office is located in the Kensington Centre on Hammersmith road, next to Kensington Olympia. The entire London branch of the organisation is housed in a large open-space office which is shared together with Future First and has a seating capacity of approximately 100 people. My motivation to undertake a placement at this organisation stemmed from my previous experience of working for People In Need – a Czech charity focused on educating children from excluded Roma communities in the Czech Republic, and from my long-held belief that is it through education that growing world inequality should be tackled.

My four-week internship at the Brilliant Club was, in broad terms, to consist of helping the organisation run the so-called Nuffield Research Placements scheme and simultaneously complete a related research project. The Nuffield Research Placement scheme is a four to six-week summer programme, where 16-17-year-old students are placed across research institutions in London. Under the supervision of a researcher (called the ‘project provider’), they complete an individual research project in the provider’s area of science. It is an opportunity for them to gain first-hand experience of what working in a research environment is really like just before applying to university. The scheme is funded by the Nuffield Foundation (hence called the ‘Nuffield Research Placements’) but it is contracted to and run by The Brilliant Club in Greater London & Surrey. On this scheme, The Brilliant Club mainly supports students from low income backgrounds or with no family history of higher education as a part of their mission to widen university access.

My individual project at The Brilliant Club would also revolve around the Nuffield Research Placements scheme. The initial idea was that the goal of the project would be to find out how the proposition to supervise a secondary-school student can be made more attractive to the researcher. Unlike other programmes run by the organisation, where tutors are paid, there is no financial support offered to project providers on this programme. As a result, a majority of researchers (over 90%) contacted to host a student decline the opportunity, and each year, there are students enrolled in the programme for whom a placement cannot be provided. My role would be to interview current project providers, attempt to identify key motivational factors and subsequently draw conclusions about how new researchers could be attracted to take part in the scheme.

My time at The Brilliant Club, that has now come to a conclusion, can be broken down into three distinct phases and I have dedicated a blog post to each of these. The first phase, in which I will talk in more detail in this blog post, essentially stretched over the period of the first two weeks. The subsequent two were a week long each.

My first day at the organisation started off with induction formalities. I received a laptop, a company e-mail address, access to the company’s shared file database, a card to access the office, and was also shown how to evacuate the building in case of an emergency.  Throughout the day, I was introduced by various members of staff in one-on-one presentations to all the programmes run by the organisation (The Scholar’s Programme, Researchers In Schools etc.). Mainly, however, I was briefed by my supervisor where things currently stand with regards to the Nuffield Research Placement scheme and what work she would like me to complete. I was told that a certain number of students have been accepted to participate in the scheme based on their academic credentials (I cannot disclose exact numbers due to the issues of confidentiality) but that The Brilliant Club has not yet managed to secure placements for all of them, i.e. that there simply are not enough project providers. Over the following two weeks, my task would be to compile contact information of researchers in universities, research institutes, small business etc. who could potentially host a student. I would then send each and every one of them a so-called ‘cold-contact’ e-mail with main information about the programme and ask them whether they would be interested in hosting a student. This was a rather dull and repetitive task but something that had to be done and there was no other way around it. My other task, was to read through and summarise a survey titled the ‘2016 London Provider Feedback Survey’. This survey was completed by previous year’s project providers and detailed their experiences of hosting a Nuffield student. The work on this would become more intense in the 3rd and 4th weeks of my time at The Brilliant Club and will be described in more detail in future blog posts.

Throughout the first two weeks, I also worked on my project. Coming from an engineering background, I had no prior knowledge of how to conduct a research interview – a social science discipline. I consulted a paper from ‘The National Centre for Research Methods’ titled ‘How many qualitative interviews is enough?’ to give me an idea of the scope of the task I had set myself. After having read through some more material about how to conduct research interviews, I began drafting a number of documents: i) a description of my research to clearly articulate its purpose and lay out what information is to be gathered from the interviewees, ii) a rough sequence of questions to be asked, iii) a draft message to be sent to the project provider to explain what the research is and why their input is essential. After two weeks of preparation, all I was waiting for, and hoped this would be a formality, was an approval from the Nuffield Foundation that I can start conducting the interviews.