Dillon Scott, a final year Korean, intercultural communication and linguistics student at York St John University reflects on his experiences as a student researcher. This blog explores Dillon’s experiences, including of trying to recruit student participants and presenting at a conference.
Throughout my final year studying at York St John University, I have been working as a student researcher alongside the Institute for Social Justice, contributing to a project exploring student perspectives on ‘University Social Impact’. This was my first time working on a research project outside of my undergraduate degree, and included my first time presenting my work at a conference. As such, I was extremely nervous to begin with. I knew my supervisors were putting a great deal of trust in me and I had to approach each task with due attention and manage my time well to make myself equal to the task.
As a student of language and linguistics I had a pre-existing interest in how language intersects with social issues. When I saw this role advertised and read the job description, I saw the opportunity to speak with students about university social impact as an extension of that interest. As I am in my final year of my undergraduate degree, I am looking forward to what comes next for me and getting some hands-on research experience helped me decide on taking my education further into postgraduate studies.
The research project was based on the notoriously hard to define term social impact. While the university defines social impact as the positive differences made by the things the university does, through jobs, health, learning, inclusion, research and stronger local systems, we wanted to understand student perceptions of this.
Students value their free time, are perhaps suspicious and to convince them to donate their time for this research I would need to develop a new approach.
The first steps I took were to create a plan for student engagement. After liaising with several members of university faculty for ideas, I began outreach to every student society, group or network I could find. Countless cold introductions and flyers, personalising every form of communication. All resulting in a response rate of around 2%. I had assumed the promise of a £10 voucher upon participation and a strong hook would be sufficient in engaging students, but I was wrong! Students value their free time, are perhaps suspicious and to convince them to donate their time for this research I would need to develop a new approach. This came in the form of engaging with students face-to-face, showing up to society socials and being permitted a few minutes to talk at the beginning of lectures. The experience of talking about the project in person and speaking in front of full lecture theatres vying for engagement actually helped cement my own understanding of the project. I was able to highlight what was potentially impactful, interesting and important about this research to students, and in turn the engagement increased. Once I had willing participants, I was able to engage in discussion with students on what social impact means to them, using open ended questions to prompt discussion in focus group settings, and one-to-one interviews. It has been incredibly eye opening being involved in such illuminating and engaging discussions about how students see our university enacting social impact for vulnerable and disadvantaged groups (and seeing where we can improve).
During the interview process for this position, I mentioned my inexperience in handling and analysing qualitative data, which was a concern for me at the time, but I expressed my willingness to learn, and how I wanted to use this experience for future academic projects. Thanks to my supervisors Matthew Reason and Jacqueline Stevenson I was given all the guidance and support I could ask for, learning how to turn student discussions into workable qualitative data. Learning to code data and develop codes into themes for data analysis is a skill I can take beyond this research project and into my dissertation and potential postgraduate qualitative data analysis positions. More broadly, I came away with a clearer sense of how this kind of research actually functions, and how engaging students in discussion can go on to shape University strategic aims and policy.
Dillon Scott in front of his poster at Portcullis House, Westminster.
The highlight of this project was the trip to Westminster, presenting on a national scale at the Posters in Parliament 2026 conference, being able to talk about this research to other undergraduate researchers and MPs. Prior to being involved in this project, I was unaware of just how much goes into producing research. Working within this role and talking to other undergraduate researchers at Posters in Parliament 2026 has provided me with a valuable perspective on the hard work and expertise at play.
Overall, being involved in this project has helped me develop both academically and professionally, I am excited to take the skills learnt throughout this experience and apply them to what comes next within my academic career!
