Week 5 - So, how did all the meetings go?

Excellent news: I now have a supervisor! The meeting on Tuesday went well, and I am all set to work on my detailed proposal. As I didn’t have a supervisor by the “deadline” of last Friday, I get an extension of a few extra days to work on this proposal—a huge relief.

The meetings with the SSO and CS, as discussed in my Week 4 post, were also very successful. The staff I met with were very excited about my project and offered to help out as much as possible. I found out that CS and HS are undergoing an internal amalgamation of their services, in order to bridge them together as “Campus Wellness” and make them more accessible. They hope to hire a communications project manager as a 1-year role to improve all of the communication to students about the services that are available, wellness advice, and other wellness-related information.

I was told that this role won’t likely be hired until the Winter. So, in the meantime, I can begin my research of student’s perceptions and attitudes regarding mental wellness-related services and information on campus—this can give whoever is hired some data and suggestions to go off of when they begin their “overhaul” of the communication. This is a really cool opportunity!

Now that I have a supervisor to support the development of my project, as well as some great contacts with the student services at UW (I will also be meeting with HS sometime either late October or early November—as they have been busy planning Mental Health Awareness Day, I won’t be able to meet with them until then), it’s time for work on my detailed proposal to begin. This will include an abstract, a project description, an outline of methods, expected results and implications, a list of references, and a project plan.

Over the past few days I’ve been focusing on the literature review aspect of my thesis that will be summarized in my list of references. As my research topic pulls a lot of different areas together—university students, university services, communications, mental health/wellness, attitudes, and behaviours, to name the more focal topics—it is a bit of a challenge to find literature that bridges all (or many) of them together. Yesterday I met with a librarian at Dana Porter for some assistance with my research, and with a bit of digging we found a few good sources for me to look through.

There’s lots to do—looks like it’s going to be a busy weekend! Time to get writing, and with any luck there will be enough time for me to take a break to watch the Blue Jays.