Our episode today features a story of change. Xiaoyu, an Applied Linguistics Master's student from the IOE, shared her views on how she has been taking the initiative and creating her own unique university experience since she came to London this March, in the middle of the lockdown. In addition to some common hurdles faced by international students, including socializing and adapting to living and working in a different culture, remote learning could undermine the unique experience of attending different universities – with everything happens on Zoom. Yet Xiaoyu decided to step out and to grasp opportunities for socialising by participating in the Coffee Connect programme and volunteering at the Confucius Institute. 'The first step is to be brave,' she emphasised, 'don't be afraid of expressing what you want explicitly and don't be ashamed of having such disconnected feelings – people share that feeling, more or less.'

SuperdiverseUCL Episode 3 - Xiaoyu: Creating My Own Student Life

In our episode today, Sasha shared his experience of being an architecture student at the Bartlett School and his views on architecture in the evolving virtual and physical worlds and how they can be made more fitting to their everchanging inhabitants. In the ‘community centre design’ project he has been working on this year in Spain, Sasha tried to design a more inclusive international community by addressing the issue of sustainability and accessibility for this specific expat group. Even for the relatively lasting works of architecture, Sasha questioned “Ideals of our world and the kind of cultural standards are all shifting – it’s not constant – that’s the key quality of it.”

SuperdiverseUCL Episode 4 - Build Better: Architecture In Virtual And Physical Worlds

Our episode today features Annie’s multicultural lifestyle and her vision of work-life balance. Being half Egyptian and half Japanese and studying at UCL in London, Annie shared how she has been navigating her life across different cultures and maintaining a balanced life with work and beyond. Living in London – one of the most culturally diverse cities – can be fascinating, and it also makes us wonder how to be culturally sensible to people from all different backgrounds when we might not necessarily be familiar with different social expectations associated with all different cultures. For people moving across cultures, Annie suggested that the first thing is always to be open and listen to people’s life experiences as a way to learn what is respectful for them to do, and give everyone’s freedom to set their own limitations on what they are comfortable doing. When talked about work-life balance, it seemed that different cultures could have different conceptualizations. Living in the fast-paced world, Annie voiced out the importance of being kind and taking care of ourselves, ‘sometimes, you have to try to treat yourself the way that you’ll treat a friend who came to you with the same problems.’

SuperdiverseUCL Episode 5 - Cross-Cultural Lifestyles and Work-Life Balance

In this special episode, we have two UCL alumni, Molly and Wang, joining us to share how their perspectives and expectations have shifted from university to work. Both now working in Shanghai, they have found the new chapter of their lives much different from when they were students. As graduation season approaches, Molly and Wang also kindly shared their journeys of choosing their career paths as well as their own job hunting experiences - interestingly, neither of the two went along with a career in line with their university degrees. Looking back to days at university, they said they wish they knew how to better enjoy the years, going beyond the tunnel vision of working hard and achieving high academically. A surprise from Wang towards the end of this episode, he brought us his new original work as a part-time music producer, a newly resealed song both written and sung by himself!

《Joker》

SuperdiverseUCL Episode 6 - From University to Work - Perspectives of Two Alumni

This is our final episode of this academic year. It's time to say goodbye. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for supporting us since April this year. In this final episode, we don't have any specific theme, no plan, no guest, just our two hosts having a bit of chat over things happening lately. Bye, and hope to see you in the future!

SuperdiverseUCL Episode 7 - The End: Thank You and Goodbye

We are a student-led podcast, aiming at promoting cultural awareness and inclusiveness by bringing different voices together.

(WeChat ID: SuperdiverseUCL)
(We moved to Acast: https://play.acast.com/s/superdiverseucl )

Superdiverse UCL

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