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From classroom to conference: a student's reflections on supporting the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health Conference 2024

Sarina Bitomsky, Global Health and Social Medicine undergraduate student, shares her experience as a King’s Undergraduate Research Fellow (KURF) supporting the organisation of the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health’s Conference 2024.

As a second-year undergraduate student at King’s, I had always been eager to get some experience outside the academic classroom under my belt - mainly as I couldn’t quite imagine what the world of global health consisted of beyond my studies.

Then, luckily for me, the King’s Undergraduate Research Fellow (KURF) projects were announced. King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowships provide undergraduate students the opportunity to work on a research project with academics and professional services staff at King’s during the summer. The roles vary but all projects provide students with an insight into various areas of research.

I saw a project at the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s, which was previously signposted to me by another academic in the department. They were looking for a student to take part in organising their flagship Conference. What first drew me to this was that it wasn’t purely an academic research project, but it involved collating and sharing 5 years’ worth of the Centre’s research! To someone fairly new to the field of global health and social medicine, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn about different types of research, how to conduct interdisciplinary work, and most importantly about collaborative and democratic research - all whilst being able to shape how this work would be presented to audiences from within and outside academia.

After I got selected as their KURF student, I had a lot of my summer left before we got to work in August. From then on, I had weekly meetings with my supervisor where we discussed the previous week’s work and planned my work for the upcoming week. This work ranged from collating different research outputs, learning about the Centre’s work, researching and brainstorming ways to make the conference more interactive and accessible, to shadowing meetings and contributing my earlier conducted research to help shape the conference. Just as predicted by the professional services team, the workload increased the closer we got to the conference, but equally, everything started to come together more and more, which was an inspiring process to witness and be a part of.

Finally, the day came – 1st of October 2024. I was equally nervous and excited to attend the conference. Walking into Science Gallery London, the venue for the conference, felt somewhat surreal, as suddenly all this work from the previous weeks and months had come together, and all the research I previously only read about felt a lot more real and impactful, especially as during the conference a lot of people with lived experience were contributing to presentations, rather than just researchers monologuing like in many other conferences.

On the day, I was assisting a visually impaired visitor, a task that I had no previous experience in so was a bit nervous about. However, having conversations with them and navigating the conference together, made me more purposefully think about how the world is perceived very differently by each individual, how some barriers might exist for some, that others don’t even need to think about. This applies both for physical impairments or limitations, as well as mental health factors that can influence how someone navigates their life and life struggles.

The conference was very insightful as I learned about the various disciplines that attendees and presenters came from and how approaches to the same mental health topic are shaped within and across disciplines. It also highlighted to me that a person with an academic research background can only learn and do so much. The effectiveness, impact, and quality of research needs the involvement of people with lived experience.

Throughout my time at the Centre, I was immensely grateful to be a part of both the team, and the community that they have. It has helped me gain insight into academic work beyond what I have been taught in my degree, and how this work can shape and have an impact on many people in the world, both on regional, local and international levels.

Working with the researchers at the Centre made me fundamentally question the way that majority of research is conducted around the world, often taking an approach centred around the researcher, rather than the people affected by the research problem. This was one of the most important things I learned – a lesson that I did not expect to gain from becoming a KURF student for this project.

 

 

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