STeWDUBS internship experience

In Autumn 2021, I attended STeWDUBS (Student Teacher Well-Being: Deepening Understanding and Building Support) project as an intern for two months to gain more experience in research and development projects. As a project funded by the European Union’s ERASMUS+, the STeWDUBS project’s aims are in line with ERASMUS+ programme’s strategic mission to promote social ends in the fields of education, training, youth and sport.  I chose to do my internship in STeWDUBS because I felt that promoting the well-being of students is a very important goal, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. I didn’t, however, have any prior experience in ERASMUS+ research projects or studying students’ well-being. As a result, I had a lot to learn about both EU-funded research projects in general and the topic of student well-being and its study.
 
Due to the COVID-19 situation in Finland, I worked remotely from home, and we had weekly meetings with my supervisor Kaisa Pihlainen. The meetings were arranged at the premises of the University of Eastern Finland or remotely via Teams. Kaisa coordinated my weekly workflow and kept me up to date with the meetings and deadlines. In addition to co-operation with my supervisor, my 2-month internship consisted of independent research work and meetings with international and Finnish project staff.
 
The project had started already in Spring 2020, so it was already in full swing as I entered. Due to this, I had a lot to catch up in the beginning. Gaining an overall picture of the project took time, effort and a great number of questions but with Kaisa’s kind help I was able to steer my way efficiently through my workflow. Fragmentation is a known challenge in knowledge work. Hence, I wanted to create a proper organization system for my work. For this, I took some influence from David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology and developed my skills further in task and time management. With the new system, I was able to have more confidence and focus in managing fragmented knowledge work.
 
During my 2-month internship in STeWDUBS, it was also interesting to learn about Kaisa Pihlainen’s role as a STeWDUBS contact person at the University of Eastern Finland. In our mentoring sessions, I gained deeper understanding of project management. It was truly intriguing to get more insight into running research projects and coordinating tasks between project members living in different countries and time zones. Time and task management is a crucial part of project management, which requires a well-maintained system of keeping everything up to date and running. Moreover, Kaisa introduced me to the process of quality assurance evaluations as a part of her project management tasks. Based on the data acquired from a quality assurance survey, I compiled a presentation according to the accessibility guidelines provided by the University of Eastern Finland.
 
In addition to project management, I learned many good practices of collaboration. The main platforms for collaboration were the virtual workspaces in Teams. In those workspaces, I learned new practices on project communication, project planning and information sharing. During the project, I also took part in co-authoring a research methodology article. As the writing team consisted of people who were very experienced in project work, I acquired new skills in team planning and problem solving by participating in the meetings. 
 
In terms of acquiring more substance knowledge, the background literature deepened my understanding of issues related to well-being in higher education context. Generally, it was surprising to learn how understudied subject student teacher well-being is in all regional contexts (Finland, England and Denmark) covered by the project. Moreover, learning about the theoretical framework of the project widened my understanding of well-being as a concept. Especially, the see-saw definition of well-being (Dodge et al. 2012) opened my eyes to see well-being as a dynamically fluctuating state between resources and challenges. Moreover, my knowledge in qualitative methodologies increased during my internship in two ways. Firstly, I got new understanding of interviews and timelining as research methods and how they can be harnessed to examine well-being in higher education contexts. Secondly, I gained more insight into qualitative data analysis by participating in the transcription of interviews.  
 
In the context of data collection and analysis, I learned more about research ethics and different practices by which the confidentiality of data is secured.  In the beginning of my internship, I was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement regarding the research data. All the data was handled strictly with GDPR data privacy measures in mind. For example, we used a password encrypted USB drive to share confidential research data.
 
Regarding technological solutions, I was introduced to a cavalcade of different technological tools utilised in the project. The main platform for collaboration was Microsoft 365 that allowed globally spread team members to come together virtually and share ideas through collaborative tools such as Teams, Sharepoint and Outlook. Scheduling application Doodle was used to get international team meetings arranged. A great feature of Doodle is that it takes care of time zone conversions automatically based on viewer’s IP-address. In data analysis, I used the software called Express Scribe for transcription. Word-to-word transcription of Finnish spoken language is still a task that must be done by a human. I would be interested to know if there are new speech recognition technologies brewing that prioritize data privacy. Use of such technologies could speed up data analysis processes in qualitative studies. 
 
On one hand, the internship broadened my theoretical and methodological knowledge in the study of well-being and, on the other, expanded my practical skillset in project management, collaboration and applying technological tools in project work. All the staff working in the project was helpful and it was such a pleasure to learn from their expertise. Because I have a history of being both a student teacher and a teacher myself, I found contributing to the project personally meaningful.
 
Thank you STeWDUBS for having me in the project and helping me to learn.
 
Tiina Muhonen
STeWDUBS Project Intern

 
References:
 
Dodge, R., Daly, A.P., Huyton, J., & Sanders, L. 2012. The challenge of defining wellbeing. International Journal of Wellbeing, 2, 222-235.