Becoming a Project Coordinator with Discovery- a journey of growth, impact & friendship
One of our Digital Media volunteers, Shubhada, had a chat with Project Co-ordinator Sam Morgan.
My favorite part has been meeting new people who study subjects that I’d never even heard of who I’d probably never have even met if I’d not taken on the role of project coordinator, these people have now become very good friends.
If I had to sum up my time as a project coordinator with Discovery in a sentence, it would be ‘a great opportunity to develop project management skills and meet new friends.The impacts on my wellbeing and employability have been extensive. As someone who has spent a lot of this year looking for a year in industry placement, the project management experience that I was able to put on my CV due to this role was always one of the first things an interviewer would ask about, and most likely lead to me getting my placement! In terms of my wellbeing, being able to take a break from my studies in a constructive waywhilst also giving back to the local community has been huge for my mental health, especially when aerospace became stressful at times. Being a project coordinator has given me an excuse to ‘turn off’ being an aerospace student for a couple of hours every week.
In a general sense, each project will have one ‘office hour’ per week where the project coordinator will meet with the Discovery team either
via zoom or in their office on singleton and it’s just a time to reply to emails and organise things as well as ask the Discovery staff questions, this is the only time you are expected to answer emails though many project coordinators decide to answer them outside of designated office hours. And then depending on the project each week the project coordinator might go out and participate on the project, (so in the case of Lego club for me this looks like going into schools and running a Lego club session), however this can be delegated to one of the volunteers (additionally some projects don’t run weekly sessions or only run sessions via zoom). And so, the time spent on a project can be very variable.
Regarding hours spent as a project coordinator, the average is about 2-5 hours per week depending on the project and what’s going on with it at the time. For Lego club specifically the average would be about 4 hours a week including an office hour and the time spent running the actual Lego club, however I have been told that Lego club is a bit more of a time-consuming project. In terms of getting more information about what each project looks like in practice, that varies quite a bit depending on the type of project, as discovery is doing their project coordinator recruitment now, whoever is interested can always email Discovery or even check the website and Discovery will try and get them in contact with the current project coordinator for some more project specific information.