Frequently, you’ll be asked to teach first year undergraduates in a seminar setting. Even with these students, who are just beginning their university journey, it might be easy to assume that freshers week means that the students all know each other. Actually, this is rarely the case, and often students will begin a term not knowing anyone in their seminar group, or clinging to the one or two people that they’ve already met as they’re living near each other in halls, or have something obvious in common like a shared nationality or home town (when I started my first degree, the other two Welsh students in the college excitedly sought me out as there was a list of where everyone had done their A-levels and they’d noticed that I’d done mine in Cardiff).

So, how do you get students to socialise with everyone in the class rather than stick to the people they already know? I can’t be the only person who finds the pressure of  having to come up with something ‘interesting’ about themselves, or a funny or embarrassing anecdote, to share with the class really stressful and awkward. One useful method is speed-meets – kind of like speed dating, where students have short conversations with each person in their class. It’s not just beneficial for first years – if the programme you teach on has elective modules, it can be great to do something like this at the start as it may be that students on the module you’re teaching on haven’t met before, especially if there’s a big overall cohort.

Dr Theo Gilbert from the University of Hertfordshire has used found this is really effective, and explains why that is and how to run a speed-meet in a short video: