Today was my last day with the Anthony Nolan Team. Honestly, I have no idea how come this month passed so quickly. Each week was slightly different as the team was changing and my tasks varied. In the last two weeks, I worked more independently. Mainly because most of the Register Development Team have been on annual leaves. As their email boxes were practically shut, many of them were directed to me, meaning I would start my day reading at least 20 emails. Not going to lie, it kind of made me feel important!
However, answering to emails wasn’t my only job. We were working on a huge change for the charity – from collecting saliva samples to swabs when recruiting new donors for the registers. I participated in meetings connected to that project and was helping the team with that transition. We had to make new information booklets, procedures, supplies order forms and trial events. They are hoping to launch it properly with the start of the new academic year. Fingers crossed!
Moreover, I was undertaking my independent research project, which involved analysing current recruitment strategies and finding new partnerships and ways to recruit more people, especially young males from ethnic minority groups. I think it was my most difficult task, but really interesting. I’ve learnt a lot about their work and strategic involvement with different organisations, groups and individuals. I have created a report that could help them in expanding the register and reaching the goal of recruiting 100 000 stem cells donors per year.
One of the best days I had in the office was the one spent in research labs! I’ve been given a tour around there, talked about the procedure of making the register, I’ve seen the way from saliva to the DNA sample and got a chance to ask all the questions I had. It was truly inspiring to see and discuss all the potential that stem cells have.
On the last day, I stayed 2,5h longer to finish everything. For the first time, I’ve seen a completely empty office! It really made me realise that it’s the end and I need to say bye. I finished the interactive map of managers that is now hanging on the wall in the office and left – proud and happy, but also a bit sad.
The team organised a lovely goodbye for me – they got me many freebies and took for an amazing lunch. And of course, as a part of ‘everyday cake policy’ in the office, there was a cake to celebrate my last day.
It was an amazing experience and I do believe that my story with Anthony Nolan has not really finished yet.
Seeing an empty office on my last day of work definitely made me reflect on the whole month.
Interactive map I’ve created. It shows Regional Register Development Managers and their areas. Names and cities can be removed as they were written with a chalkpan. This one, the map can be useful between different teams and can be updated in case of a change in the team.That’s us (part of the RD team) on my last day- we had a swab trial event in the British Legion.
After a brief hiatus, I am back to complete the final half of my project at London Nightline! Right now, big changes are happening at Nightline as the charity moves from its long-term home at the University of London Union to a new location in Central London. In the meantime, I find myself at Nightline’s temporary office nestled in some KCL student halls. This means a new commute to South London and new challenges such as ‘How do you ride a bike with no wheels?’, which is how I’ve found it after a short stay in the new neighbourhood.
Transportation challenges aside my project is progressing well, with the trials & tribulations of organising volunteer interviews and collating feedback data all but complete I find myself freshly adept at conducting interviews and creating both spreadsheets and surveys. I now turn my focus to report writing where I have begun to identify key areas where Nightline is working effectively and others where there’s room for improvement as a service. My aim now is to convey this information concisely and effectively within my report and make sure the relevant people within the charity can put improvements into action.
My time at Nightline so far has given me some great experience of volunteer engagement and project organisation. I have been lucky to work with Grace, the very helpful and knowledgeable new coordinator of London Nightline who has been on hand to offer her advice and views about the important aspects of the project. Over the next couple of weeks, I look forward to bringing my report to fruition and then over the next year seeing how this the findings of this research can be used to improve the way we work as service.
My time at the RHN has sadly reached its end but I know this isn’t the end for my project.
During the 3rd week I spent my time putting together a presentation for primary schools where I had to channel my inner child. I found it quite difficult explaining such a serious disability in terms that children could understand while still making the presentations enjoyable. I found some resources online from charities that help explain neuro-disability to young children so that they can better understand the condition when it affects a loved one. To make the presentations interactive I came up with a few props and experiments including a ‘brain box’ that will be used to explain the touch sense to the children (as you can see I’m very proud of my box) and a jelly bean taste experiment to highlight the importance of the smell sense.
The last week was spent adding the finishing touches to my presentations and collating information on local primary and secondary schools that I am going to contact with regards to my project. Unfortunately schools have broken up for the summer so it’s been difficult to get in contact with them but I’ll keep trying and hopefully in September I’ll have more schools interested in my project.
My last day at the RHN was filled with cake and eggs (odd mix I know) and was one of my favourite days there. One of the major aims of my project is to raise awareness on how vulnerable our brains are to damage and how important it is to protect them. Logically, this ended up with us making a series of different ‘egg helmets’ out of polystyrene cups and dropping the eggs in the car park to show what a massive difference wearing a helmet can make (tragically only 3/7 of the eggs survived).
I think it’s fairly obvious which prototype survived.
Working with the people at the RHN and seeing the amazing difference they make to people’s lives was one of the best experiences I could’ve asked for, I’ve learnt so much about the brain and how much we take it for granted and I really hope my project will benefit the charity.
Last weeks Healthcare tech community roadshow had inundated the researchers with a plethora of fresh data to interpret and analyse. Luckily for me, this meant that I had been presented with the unique opportunity to see the process of report-writing first-hand and live; right at the start of the week. From this, I was able to decide on the format and parameters of my own report.
My suggestion to my friends at the refugee meeting place, for an in-house written monthly publication to be written by the team of regulars that I met with, had not fallen on deaf ears. Over the next several weeks, I hope to help them develop this from an idea to its fruition. Following my visit to the Victoria Hall meeting place, I headed to the office to find it unusually quiet.
Unfortunately, the in-house DJ, who constantly played through his collection of catchy 70’s pop music for everyone in the office, was on leave. After finishing up some coding (this is where you simplify interview transcriptions into easy-to-understand issue points), I asked a colleague if I could help her deliver sessions, on the locality plan, to some community groups. And then came the saddest moment of my 4 weeks, “I would have asked for your help Kishan, but you won’t be with us by then”. Until this point, I had been pretending that my precious Summer was never going to end.
With one hand stroking my beard and the other with a mug of coffee, I spent the rest of my week behind a laptop screen, typing up what I had found out an into a report. From this I learnt, always start writing long pieces of work as soon as possible. By doing so, one is being kind to their future selves.
Bolton is home to the most fulfilling student lunch offer – 2 for £1 Pasties. So technically, London has nothing on Bolton.
I’ve always felt a strong connection to my hometown and so it’s been an absolute pleasure to see how supportive the community has been to the refugee and asylum seeker populations. Speaking to Bolton’s newest inhabitants has not only offered me a fresh perspective on life and also helped me to become bolder in striking up conversations with fellow Boltonians. Furthermore, this experience has advanced my understanding of the life course theory which will no doubt aid me in the future in medical practice. Additionally, it has reaffirmed and strengthened my desire to work around policy research and implementation.
I’m genuinely sad to say that my 4 weeks at Drop4Drop has come to an end. It has been a great experience in a new city with a great team, partaking in interesting work.
In my final week at Drop4Drop I have been analysing and summarising project partnership proposals from other organisations to see the eligibility and suitability of Drop4Drop working with them in the aim of eliminating global thirst. This has also entailed me doing some outreach to other charities and organisations to see if they would be willing and able to work alongside Drop4Drop.
This week I also got the opportunity to look at geological reports from data that was collected on site by the geologists working the project in real time. This was a great insight into understanding professional geological fieldwork reports and picking out key information from them that can then be used in the decision making process back in the office. In this case it was determining the best filter design to be integrated into the projects based on the data about the water quality that I received.
From my Charity Insights Internship I have learned a lot about the processes involved in running a project from the initial identification of an area all the way through to finishing it, monitoring the infrastructure and implementing any maintenance work. This has been very insightful and I hope will prove valuable in my future career in water resources.
Knowing that the work that I have been doing will have an impact on the lives of people that live half way around the world that I may otherwise have never had an opportunity to help really adds an even greater sense of satisfaction to my last 4 weeks.
This internship also gave me my first insight into what life will be like working in an office giving me an idea of ‘office etiquette’. Thankfully the team at Drop4Drop made this very easy for me and made me feel extremely welcome and involved within the group. This has helped to prepare me for my life in the ‘real world’ as a graduate and makes me actually look forward to it.
Week 3 began with some proper work, looking into the needs of cancer patients in digital – exploring the different attitudes towards digital as well as the different ways patients use it. This, firstly, involved investigating a list of various health apps currently on the market and seeing how they worked, different features they had and in what ways they’ve hit the target market. Funnily enough, this involved actually having a play around on most of them so if I’m ever in need of health-restoration, I know exactly where to go!
With everyone at Macmillan being so friendly, people in other departments are kind enough to give you an induction into their area of work, answering any questions you may have. I leapt onto this opportunity and tried to explore various other departments such as social media, evidence engagement and video. It was fantastic to see how, for example, Facebook and Twitter are so carefully used from a company perspective, as well as how the research gathered by Macmillan is efficiently and accurately portrayed to the public. Most importantly for me though, I really enjoyed talking to the video team because of my aspiration to one day enter the world of documentaries – talking to them helped me understand the steps I might have to take to gain more experience in this industry.
We also had our first meeting for our intern fundraising event. It was pretty obvious after a few minutes that a pub quiz was the most popular option which made it quite easy to decide. With about 3/4 of the interns helping, it allowed us to fairly split up the work amongst us – with me being on questions! I met up with a Macmillan pub quiz master to teach me the ways of conducting a successful pub quiz and it seemed that it was much harder than originally thought! But thanks to him, we had the building blocks and key knowledge of how to host a great pub quiz so fingers cross…
The weekly meetings with my manager helped to keep me on track of what I was doing, ensuring I had enough work to do each week. Allowing me to sit in on various meetings and debriefs, I gained more of an understanding about our project which may eventually allow me to contribute to how Macmillan develop their digital presence in the future!
The end of week 5 has left me hitting the ground running, making it much easier to get on with work as I have a much deeper understanding of what’s going on now! I hope the second half of the internship well be even better!
PS I’ve got a great view of Imperial College’s Queen’s tower from where I’m sitting – spectacular.
Following a long, hard but very enjoyable weekend working with the team at Boardmasters festival, I am now back in the office.
Being the chosen sponsored charity at the site gave us a huge advantage, in that artists would promote our movements, whilst videos and artwork such as a boat created from plastic bottles purely sourced from UK beach cleans were displayed at the festivals most popular locations.
I was very much involved with community engagement regarding the new campaign ‘Wasteland’, and informing the public on how to reduce their individual plastic footprint. Working closely with regional Reps from across the country gave me the opportunity to understand more about the problems they also faced with respect to marine pollution in different areas such as Scotland, Southampton and Essex; the experience has very much inspired me to become a regional Rep once the internship finishes.
My next task will be to work out how to re-map the online nationwide maps to smaller scale regional maps, in a user-friendly format which is also geographically accurate. Having 9 regional areas across the UK, this will be a task that may take a number of days to complete. I want to apply my GIS skills in order to create a more interactive map experience, whereby lines join up Reps across regions, with different colours or line thicknesses could portray especially strong relationships between certain Reps. Perhaps introducing small photos of each rep could create more of a personal map, and some information about each Rep to accommodate this would improve the currently rather dull maps.
It’s no secret that the NHS has had a tricky past with technology. Just this year, we saw malicious software cripple 61 trusts across England and Scotland! However, the demands of an ageing population and the shift in the supply of healthcare professionals has meant that tech-enabled care is needed quickly to alleviate pressure from the bed blocking phenomenon.
As part of the devolution of health and social care in Greater Manchester, a Bolton locality plan set out how healthcare services would change over the next five years. This plan looks to introduce technology such as a push button, or fall sensors and alarm pendants worn around the neck, that can allow patients to safely go back to their own homes, rather than staying in hospital longer than necessary.
A Tuesday evening meeting with the Bolton Borough Youth Council reminded me of my fond memories as a Youth Councillor. I used the session to gather young people’s voice on current service issues as well as to introduce aspects of the locality plan. Within the last two years, since I was kicked out of the youth council for being too old, a lot has changed. The new group had managed to take on, even more, projects and even acquired a new fancier place of meeting. I wish I was two years younger! Seeing the continuous change in the social and cultural habits of the younger millennials, I finished up my time-slot by discussing how the Youth Council could actively work with HealthWatch to support their health research work. This is something that I will be following up with in due course.
To ascertain feedback, so that the locality plan could be adjusted to make the towns healthcare services fit for the future, HealthWatch helped run a community roadshow in the centre of Bolton. In a large white tent, you could find a team of eager HealthWatch researchers looking to learn your opinions on the £28.8 million plan for Bolton’s health and social services.
Naturally, I played the role of Dr Patel giving shoppers the chance to experience a simulation of video-call GP appointments. To ensure that this was nothing more than a simulation, I wrote up fixed scenarios that could be acted out by the willing patient. To my surprise, the majority people thought positively about this issue and not one person mentioned the need for additional safeguarding. Whilst I was off-duty, I supported the work of my colleagues by collecting people’s opinions on wearable and home monitoring technology. Undeterred by unpolished Gujarati and Hindi language skills, I managed to discuss concerns that some of the elderly minority population had.
In this third week at HealthWatch Bolton, I’ve sadly had little time to work with the BRASS (Befriending Refugees and Asylum Seekers) Centre. Instead, I visited the Victoria Hall Refugee and Asylum Seeker meeting place to collect more data. I got the scary feeling that for some people; I was the first friendly face, with which they felt comfortable enough to talk through their problems with, that they had come across since their resettlement.
Now just under ¾ of the way through my internship at Sacrewell and I have catalogued about 3 times the number of objects I originally aimed for.
The project is progressing rapidly and I am really enjoying working at such a fast pace. Every time I finish cataloguing the machinery in one barn then I feel a sense of achievement, but am a bit lost. I end up scraping the bottom of the barrel searching for useful tasks to do (pun intended, we have a lot of barrels). Just when I am getting bored of double checking manufacturer’s names or re-taking photographs in better lighting… then someone tells me there is a hidden pile of objects over there! I spring into action, camera in one hand and a pair of work gloves in the other. What originally appears like a mass of tangled wood and metal deconstructs into 3 mangles, 3 washing machines, 3 grind stones, a steelyard, a chaff cutter and a cake breaker. Please don’t make the same mistake I did and think a cake breaker belongs in the Great British Bake Off tent. It is for breaking up oil cakes, made from the pulp left after the extraction of oil from plant seeds, into small pieces to be fed to livestock. Not to be presented to Mary Berry.
As it stands, I have catalogued 566 entries into my database. However some of them hold up to 24 objects in 1 entry, because who feels the need to individually label 24 identical wooden wheel spokes. Not me. I am far too busy finding new and exciting machinery! Which leads me to the latest discovery…
Sacrewell is a 550 acre farm, 500 acres of which is rented to Riverford Organic Farmers. I had heard rumours that one of the barns on their site contained some more farm machinery along with 3 double-decker vintage buses. Having investigated on Friday afternoon, I can confirm it contains A LOT. Probably as much as I have found on the rest of the farm put together. So with just over 1 week of my internship to go, I say ‘bring it on!’
To conclude, the project is going brilliantly and I am having way too much fun!
Halfway through my internship with the Anthony Nolan Team. I’m surprised how quickly I got used to working here! Got used to my desk, colleagues and places for lunch around.
So what am I actually doing in the office?
My first week was focused around inductions, so meetings with different teams. Anthony Nolan hires around 350 people. It may seem quite a lot as for a charity. It is not. Individual teams are small, thus, let’s say ‘Politics and Public Affairs’ in Register Development counts only 4 people. They deal with everything connected to MPs, affairs connected to stem cells, blood cancer etc. This year they’ve put extreme amount of work to change government’s attitude towards second transplants. Successfully! Another example – communication team. Again, just a few people. They talk with patients and donors, make interviews, write stories – they are constantly on their phones. They get close with some patients, follow the most emotional stories of donors, organise campaigns. I had a pleasure to be a part of one of them- we are targeting young people and BAME to join the register. We made a photo-shoot that was promoting the idea of students donating stem cells. Another team- studio. They are incredible. And their computers are incredible too. They are the designers, producing anything connected to graphics. I am creating an interactive map with them at the moment, which is meant to help the whole office navigate between different regional managers.
Last Friday I had a pleasure to participate in the ‘Summer in the City’ festival with AN team. That was my first recruitment event and my first recruited donors. It is actually an amazing feeling to sign up the form of someone who thanks to you decided to be a potential lifesaver. You honestly feel like a hero. Summer in the City is the biggest YouTube festival in the UK, so… that was a fun day at work ;). I’ve then learnt a lot about the donations and processing donors’ data with the Operation Team, where we analyse all the forms and correct the mistakes.
My favourite projects so far were: organising the Away Day, planning a team trip to Barcelona for the International RAG conference, creating a presentation for Marrow AGM. Although each of them took loads of time, me staring at the computer screen for hours and replying to tons of emails, submitting the reports to my coordinator was really rewarding.
Fun facts about office life. Everyday there’s something to celebrate. Either someone is going for a maternity leave, or someone has birthday, or someone is getting married. There is a cake everyday. I am not kidding. Sometimes when there isn’t anything particular happening, the team gathers for ‘High Fives’ – they share their new achievements, give each other high fives and … eat cake. Can’t complain. We have an hour break for lunch everyday. People pair up or go in groups to different places and wherever we go they know their tricks (10% discount for our office in one place, 50% discount on Tuesdays in the other place…). I am working, but I am also having an amazing time.
