My experience as a Warwick Welcome Service (WWS) Ambassador

Hio! Welcome back to another blog! Hope you found my previous blog on my experience as a Student Ambassador for the School of Engineering resourceful, and hopefully motivated you to apply for it this year! Now, continuing this mini series of the many opportunities that I undertook in my first year, I bring to you this blog on the topic of my experience as a Student Ambassador for the Warwick Welcome Service.

As I said in the previous blog, Student Ambassadors are students recruited by the various academic departments at university as well as the university marketing team to help in various outreach and recruitment events that the university organises. These events include Open Days, activities in local schools, campus tours to visitors, and activities that raise awareness towards higher education and Warwick.

As a student, there are 2 types of Student Ambassador jobs that you can apply and work as. 1) Student Ambassador for your academic department (for the School of Engineering in my case) and 2) Student Ambassador for the Warwick Welcome Service. The previous blog hopefully gave you a good insight into the first type. Now let’s move onto the second one.

2. Student Ambassador for the Warwick Welcome Service

This role deals with a much larger area and type of activities in comparison to the one specific for your department. You will be given access to a website that has the details of each upcoming job. This website is constantly updated with new opportunities as soon as they are needed. You can easily browse through all of them, look at the details, and if you are available for the time needed and interested, you can easily apply for that job by clicking a button. The organisers will then contact you if you are needed for that job if it has not been filled by anyone else. Since we have more than 300 WWS ambassadors in the university, you have to be proactive and apply early to a job to get a higher chance of getting it. 

The application process was fairly simple and similar to the engineering one. I just had to answer 3 or 4 questions regarding the job, give details of previous work experiences, and send the form. I was delighted to know that there was no interview stage and I received a confirmation message soon informing me that I was successful in my application. I then received the details for the online training where I was informed about the details of the role, the process for applying to a job, my expectations, and safety procedures. Although I was amazed to see more than 300 students attending that training, I was a bit disappointed to find that only 1 other student from Engineering was part of the group. Guess everyone becomes a bit careless when going through their university emails ;). 

Since then, I have worked on loads of events as an ambassador. I worked on a “Talk and tour” event that had students of a local Coventry school come to visit the university. They attended a talk by one of the Heads of Teaching at the university who explained what university is like and the differences that one can find when transitioning into university from sixth form. At the end of the talk, we ambassadors were brought in front of everyone and answered any questions that the students had. This was then followed by dividing everyone into groups and each group was accompanied by an ambassador on a campus tour.

Another event that I worked in was a Realising Opportunities Note Making event. Our university is a partner of RO and helps deliver sessions to sixth form students on skills essential in University. Students who attend these sessions are given points and will receive an advantage in their A level results. We ambassadors were required to help facilitate this event. Each ambassador was appointed a group of 6-7 students who they were required to help conduct each of the activities that helped teach them the skills of note making and how to be efficient in it. The whole event lasted around 4-5 hours and was definitely an interesting job that I worked in.

Apart from these, some of the other interesting jobs that I have worked on is helping in the Canley Parade as a traffic steward, as a panellist in the Warwick Africa Pre Departure Brief, as a stall manager in a university fair all by myself in a school in Bath and Oldbury, and a photo shoot for the Dean of Students office! (Head over to the website to find me!)

That’s everything about being a Warwick Welcome Service Ambassador! Hope you enjoyed reading about all of my experiences as much as I enjoyed writing about them! Look out for the next blog on another opportunity that you can grab in your first year! Until then, thanks for reading and feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below!