This week, we are sharing the writing of participants in the 2023 Community Engagement Programme! In this blogpost, you can hear more about Kaelyn’s experience with the CEP, specifically how her time with the CEP honed her interpersonal skills as a teammate and mentee.  

As university students, we tend to have a habit of orbiting among our peers with seldom opportunity to gain professional interpersonal skills through work experiences. The lack of those interpersonal skills is often what makes acquiring work experience difficult but without exposure to the professional field, developing those skills is also a challenge. Therefore, this often leaves students in a cycle of trying to develop skills without having the relevant experiences to do so.

This is one of the key features of the Community Engagement Programme which was one of the driving points of interest for me when I was applying for this opportunity. This, alongside, a strong desire to work adjacent to the subject of my degree in a volunteer position made this opportunity so educational.

As a team, we were able to develop working relationships with numerous people of different positions such as our charity partners, mentors, and fellow peers who are at different stages of their academic journey. And these relationships, I found and learned, all required different skills and flexibility in our approach to social interactions.

Our mentor, Jonathan, was an amazing sounding board for discussing different approaches in communications from his personal and professional experiences. Having that in-built mentor system within the programme was so helpful for me to learn those crucial skills and be able to develop them throughout the programme as our team navigated our project.

Through brainstorming sessions between team members, and check-in meetings with our charity partner and mentor, I learnt to be more adaptable in my approaches to work and communicate my thoughts and ideas with my fellow team members. Learning to manage and communicate the expectations of yourself, your charity partner and fellow team members was one of the main things I discovered during this programme and is something which I believe to be invaluable going forward in life.

Being part of this programme allowed me the opportunity to develop these interpersonal skills through interactions with members of the LSE community as well as with our team’s charity partner which I would not have had opportunity to do elsewhere. This programme is a great opportunity for anyone looking to gain and develop these skills within the LSE community through volunteering.

If Kaelyn has inspired you to volunteer, check out one of our other ongoing opportunities or book a one-to-one with David Coles, the Volunteer Centre Manager if you have more questions. And why not follow us on Twitter, and Instagram to stay up-to-date with our events and opportunities and read our blog for more volunteering tips and stories.