2024 internships for MMU Psychology students

2024 Internships: Work Experience for Manchester Metropolitan (MMU) Psychology Students

Making Education a Priority (MEaP) recently welcomed another exceptional cohort of student interns as part of our long-standing academic partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). Our ongoing collaboration with MMU continues to be one of the cornerstones of our employability initiative, bridging the experience gap for university students by offering structured, real-world workplace opportunities within the community sector.

For the 2024 internship cycle, we hosted two brilliant undergraduate Psychology students, Aimee and Lyba. Over the course of their placement, both interns successfully applied their academic insights to key organisational projects, navigating the modern demands of hybrid working and digital collaboration whilst significantly enhancing their practical workplace skills.

2024 Internships: The Onboarding Experience

To prepare the students for a professional environment, both Aimee and Lyba underwent a comprehensive onboarding process. This structured induction was designed to ground them in MEaP’s core mission and operational structure, ensuring they felt supported from day one. The onboarding sessions covered:

• Introduction to MEaP: An overview of our vision, values, and community impact.
• Getting to know the two students to understand their career ambitions and what they have done so far. We were pleasantly surprised that they already had work experience and were quite looking forward to be getting more.
• Place of Work & Environment: Setting clear expectations for navigating their tasks.
• Introductions: Meeting the interns, and their MEaP team colleagues, especially Christina and Manuella with whom they would work closely.
• Project Briefs: Clear outlines of the chosen briefs and target areas.
• Student Expected Outcomes: Setting clear goals for professional growth and deliverables.

As part of their transition to a hybridworking framework, both interns also engaged with our tips for working remotely and hybrid. This session was aimed at instilling best practices to ensure productivity, sharp focus, clear communication, and seamless virtual collaboration whilst working from home.

2024 Internships: Website evaluation

As an initial benchmarking exercise, Aimee and Lyba conducted a thorough review of the existing MEaP website to gather general user impressions. This exercise proved invaluable; by evaluating the website against target audience needs, their insights were utilised as essential feedback to help shape the architecture of the new, upcoming strategic MEaP website.

In parallel with her brief, Aimee looked into the evaluation of the MSSP related posts and pages while Lyba analysed user journeys, both helping to inform our future website design.

2024 Internships: The individual projects

To ensure continuous development, a weekly review process was established. Each week, the interns presented their current progress to a distributed team, some via Zoom and some face-to-face, which was followed by an interactive feedback session. These meetings focused on providing constructive guidance, helping them refine their work and establishing clear task communications (e.g., as developing structured “captions” for data transparency), and ensuring all deliverables were precisely aligned with stakeholder needs. Both interns approached their internship with a clear focus on self-development and making a tangible contribution to the organisation.

2024 Internships – Aimee’s briefs: MSSP Partner Alignment, Data Entry, calendar management

Aimee’s work was spread across multiple briefs, balancing data, content and calendar management. Aimee took on the strategic task of mapping the Manchester Supplementary Schools Partnership (MSSP) partner list, evaluating their current digital presence across various networks. She meticulously detailed web and social media links to compile a comprehensive MSSP Partners List Spreadsheet. Supported by our team member, Manuella, Aimee enhanced her practical IT competencies, focusing on basic spreadsheet operations, structured data entry, organisation, and essential preparatory research.

In her second brief, building on her operational tasks, Aimee successfully completed a summary of our latest social media posts. She then advanced to Brief 3, where she advanced the content creation of of a comprehensive content calendar, demonstrating strong organisational skills and an understanding of digital audience engagement.

2024 Internships – Lyba’s briefs: Applying Psychology to User Acquisition

Lyba focused her placement on leveraging her psychological academic background to drive digital engagement and user acquisition within a contemporary social networking context.

Lyba strategically designed marketing materials tailored to foster positive community engagement and build trust. She developed five dedicated user-retention social media posts, carefully utilising psychological insights to craft messages that encourage sustained user interaction and community cohesion.

Extending her focus to email marketing, Lyba worked on identifying specific target demographics within our audience. She drafted tailored email marketing communications, using psychological framework concepts to optimise message clarity, resonance, and positive engagement.

2024 Internships: Presentation, Outcomes and Employability Impact

Lyba and Aimee presented their completed strategies and creative concepts to the wider MEaP team via Zoom, demonstrating how psychological theories can be effectively translated into practical, impactful operations.

The 2024 MMU Psychology internships highlight the dual value of our work-based learning partnerships. While Aimee and Lyba gained vital technical  skills—ranging from advanced remote collaboration and spreadsheet data management to target audience analysis —MEaP benefited directly from their fresh insights and academic expertise.

The analytical feedback provided during their website evaluations has given us a solid foundation for our future digital development, and their creative outputs continue to support our communication channels. We look forward to continuing our work with MMU, supporting the next generation of professionals as they step out of the lecture theatre and into the professional world.