Can we invite our students into our sections for a while?
Last summer, the first batch of students started our Plant and Food Science bachelor. We knew that it would be a small group in order to create an attractive study environment but hoped that our students would interact with the 60 starting Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine to create a feeling of belonging.
![[Translate to English:]](/fileadmin/_processed_/d/4/csm_Jim_Rasmussen_lille_1c4ca2f214.jpg "[Translate to English:]")
We recently learned that our five students, for various reasons, will not start the third semester. Often it can be a relief when a task suddenly disappears from your desk, but for us who were planning the third and fourth semester it is actually not.
Our five students say that it is not the quality of the teaching causing them to stop, but the lack of peers to interact with – they need a study environment. We need to change that before the second batch starts after summer in four months’ time. We need a discussion among us on what we can do to stimulate the students’ roots to grow sufficiently deep for them to anchor here.
One idea could be to bring them closer to our research environments. In our sections we have many young people – slightly older than the new students – who share some of the same interests. If our Plant and Food students meet other young people or maybe even their teachers at the coffee machine, it may overcome the present lack of older peers that normally creates a study environment.
Can we, in five years, host and have office space for five batches of students in our sections? No, we can probably not. We can do this until we have received additional batches of students so the fellowship among their peers can stand on its own feet. But we need to acknowledge that the students starting after summer will again be ‘the first batch’.
Another complementary idea is to offer the new batch student jobs. If we hire our students for a few hours a week to work on projects and to conduct tasks relevant to their courses, then I believe it can further strengthen the feeling of belonging. A positive side effect will be that our students will finish their studies with a stronger network both internally and externally.
Of course, we are talking to the two other educations at AU Viborg about how we can enhance student interactions, but we have to start discussing in the coffee corners how we can help the new batch of Plant and Food students to feel at home.