Welcome

As alumni of the University of Suffolk your impact is wide reaching. Recent issues of this newsletter have focused on your role as our ambassadors, how you can reconnect with the University and the benefits you can receive by doing so. Through this issue I want to take an opportunity to highlight the importance of our alumni community in supporting our learning and teaching, and helping to shape the future lives of our students through mentoring and sharing your experiences.

The University is committed to ensuring that all of our students graduate equipped to take the first steps on long, successful and enriching careers, as enquiring professionals, creatives and entrepreneurs. This underpins our learning and teaching strategy “Transforming Lives” informing how we are moving to design our programmes, and encourage students to develop their confidence and skills through placements, internships and volunteering opportunities. It also shapes some of the targets we have set in our Access and Participation Plan, looking to reduce inequalities in successful progression to future study or highly skilled employment between some of our students. to successful role models and mentors is critical to this, and we think our alumni are best placed to undertake this role.

As you read through this issue, please take a moment to reflect on your own journey to success. In remembering how you came into our community and how you developed through the course of your studies, I hope you will recognise how far you have come, and how you could support our current students in identifying their own future paths to success.

I hope you will consider joining our Alumni Mentoring Scheme, and help make our strategy to transform lives a truly lived experience.

Dr Ellen Buck Director of Learning and Teaching

But we want to do more, to offer our students more. Helping our students to understand how to navigate uncertainty, and perceived barriers; helping our students understand their potential and how to achieve their goals is something that we feel is best done by those who have lived those same experiences. Having access