Jess's interview with Oz Osbourne

1. What exactly do you do in college?
I work on the additional support team and my role is to help students with emotional help & well being.

2. What sort of help do you offer students?
When it comes to people's emotional health it can cover anything but effectively if a student is having any kind of difficulties that perhaps are not neccesarily learning related it might be due to the stress & pressure of work, it might be to do with family life or friends but anything that's causing them to be in less than good emotional help & well being. They can come along & it's just for an informal chat & we take it from there.

3. What sort of problems do students come to you about?
It really is a completely wide range. It might be that someone is struggling with their work load, but obviously tutors & personal tutors can help with those things as well so it tends to be when it's having a greater than usual effect on how they're thinking & feeling about things & their general experience of things. So I think it's fair to say that all students at times, particularly with exams, work load & coursework, can struggle with some things but I think it's when it becomes almost unmanagable that they might come along & start off with a informal chat then we see what route they can go from there to get more help & support.

4. What would you want to say to a student who wanted to talk to you but felt too embarrassed?
I think it would probably be that it's, in the time that I've been in college, it's the number of students & the range of students that come to see me, it's certainly no embarrassment to say that everybody, at some point in our lifes, however well we appear to coping to other people it's ok every now & again to ask for help. And it's certainly not a weakness & infact by asking for help you can deal with things more quickly than if you let them run on then perhaps that's a sign of strength & there wouldnt be people in the college like myself & other student support officers if a lot of students didn't need the help & support that we offer.

5. What do you enjoy about your job?
I think it's certainly the range of challenges that we have, but I guess it's just knowing that sometimes a student will come to see myself or one of the other additional support members & perhaps go on & achieve a little bit more than they thought they were able to because they were able to deal with some of the problems & barriers that may have prevented them from achieving that way.

6. How many students do you see a week?
That varies, I'm only in for about six hours a week & sometimes I'll have appointments all day so that would be a maximum of 5 or 6 students. Some weeks there's only 1 or 2, sometimes there are students I see over a long term & will see every week, sometimes students will just drop when they need help. On top of one to one sessions I also have offered work shops around exam stress so in those weeks it might be that I've run a couple of work shops & they've been attended by 8-10 people in those weeks it could be up to 20 students. But generally it's 4-5 a week on average.

7. Is there anything you would like us to use to promote you in the video?
The space we see people in because we try to make it a neautral space & things, is probably quite good. I hope that students can see that any of the additional support team look reasonably normal & welcoming.

8. Do you think there’s any way of improving the support service in college?
I think that it'd be naive to think that there werent ways of improving & I guess things like additional resources but we all know that there's so many things that colleges need to pay for & have resources for. So I think that we're all grateful & hopefully some of the students are that we're here. I think what you're doing is a good thing & lots of students dont know that we're here, the more ways to promote is good.