Working for the University in the Summer

During my summer months at uni, I don’t get to spend my time as a lazy student, tucked up in bed all day watching Jeremy Kyle and This Morning; instead, I spend mine on the top floor of the Queen Mary building in our Greenwich campus. I work as part of the Enquiry Unit staff and it is up to myself and my colleagues to deal with any calls that come in to our free phone telephone number. During the summer months our job gets extremely busy as we take on the mammoth task of ‘Clearing’. For those of you who don’t know, Clearing gives the chance for students who do not already hold a place at university to make a late application to those courses with spaces still available.

A day in the life of …. A Clearing officer
The main task for the teams during Clearing is to answer calls and try to solve enquiries. The things that we deal with could range from simply giving someone directions to the university, to fighting to get them a place on a course so that they can fulfil their dreams of attending university.

Some days we have a lot of fun and talk so extremely friendly people; these are usually the people that are most grateful for your help and hearing their happiness really helps us to get a sense of job satisfaction. There are many cases during Clearing where applicants are putting all of their hopes into an application and we will do everything we can to support them.

Obviously not every customer is a happy one and we do deal with some extremely difficult calls during our work in the summer where people are emotional and unhappy. But at the end of the day we are all experienced in customer service and do everything we can to turn the person’s unhappiness around and solve their problems to the best of our abilities.

During this time we also work in a team, which means that we can share a fantastic bank of knowledge among us. If an enquirer calls and wants an honest opinion about a certain course, then the chances are that someone in our office has done that course or a very similar one and we are able to transfer the call to them for a personal perspective and more information.

All of the staff that work during Clearing and also throughout the year in the Enquiry Unit are current students. This means that we not only know about the information given to us during training, but also personal insights that we have gathered along our journeys. We all come from a variety of backgrounds and have unique university experiences. You can read about many of us in the ‘Student Experience Blogs’ page. Our blogs are a new task for us at work. We wanted to pass on some of our experiences and advice to new and perspective students as we have first-hand experience at all aspects of university life.

The University of Greenwich also has an active Twitter account, which you can follow at @UniofGreenwich.