Life AFK
Sea Rowing Competition
May 2025
I was one of the committee members who restarted Aberystwyth University rowing club last September, and I’ve adored the experience of building the club from the ground up. We had the chance to take part in a league race for the first time this May, so we put together a team to see how our progress stood up. The team was made up of 5 people, with me in the stroke and a member of the town club coxing. Our group ended up coming in first place, which was not only a personal victory but one for the club as well.
Ada Lovelace Colloquium
April 2025
I had the opportunity to present a poster at the BSC Ada Lovelace Colloquium in Glasgow. I decided to create a poster about how AI is being used to manipulate people and how it can and will be used as a form of psychological warfare in the future if we do not introduce proper regulation. This is a topic which is important in an age where technology is changing faster than we can keep up with it, and hostile groups are grooming people online more than ever
Whilst I enjoyed the experience of researching a topic, then creating a poster and presenting my ideas, what I benefited from the most was meeting and interacting with my peers. It was inspiring to see such a diverse selection of ideas and presentations, and it encouraged me to push myself further with my submission next year. I hugely enjoyed listening to professionals in the field and hearing about their experiences, and I hope to attend the event again next year.
Endeavour Workshops
Summer 2019 & 2020
I planned, led, and executed two workshops in partnership schemes connected to King Edward VI School. This scheme aims to give primary school children new experiences in order to broaden their horizons and allow them to explore their interests. Both times I volunteered to help with this program, I was chosen to lead the planning and organisation of the activities. This all took place over the course of two days. On the first day, three other volunteers and I designed activities which would make up a 45-minute class, and on the second day, we ran the workshop three times for a class of 30 children.
Debating and Public Speaking Workshop 2019
My team and I decided to focus on what we thought was absolutely necessary for all forms of debating and public speaking, instead of focusing on any particular type of debate with rigid rules. The activities we ran were: A ‘Hot-Air Balloon Debate’, we explained how this debating exercise worked, then gave them simple prompts such as what the best sport is; A fallacies lesson, where we explained what a fallicy is and the most common ones; A ‘flip flop’ game, where a student would start speaking about their opinion on a subject such as ‘superman is good’ then would need to change their opinion once the word ‘flip’ or ‘flop’ is said; Finally an speaking exercise where we taught them about key elements of public speaking such as pausing, keeping good speaking pace, looking at your audiance, and projecting your voice.
This workshop was hugely successful. We had 2/3 of the groups that took part in the day vote this experience as their favourite, and at the end of the session, when we asked questions to check what the students retained, every group was able to recall key details correctly.