Projects
2025 Internships: Work experience for MMU students
MEaP welcomes new interns from MMU for 2025 Internships
MEaP’s collaboration with Manchester Metroplitan University (MMU) has yielded a lot of success over the year, with most students reporting an increase in confidence and skills. While so far, we had only been welcoming Psychology students, in 2025, we were a little more ambitious and also welcome MMU Nutrition students for the first time and it is hard for us to regret it! All our 2025 internships turned out to be really positive and humbling. The internships lasted a minimum of 6 weeks.
The Interns
Ella and Janna were first year students from the MMU Psychology department and Luka and Sidra came from the MMU Nutrition department. The internship was faciliated by Manuella Essaka of 3E Web Media on behalf of MEaP and Christina, the project coordinator. All students were successfully onboarded and able to work in the MEaP’s focus area that most contributed towards their personal career goals, as well as the aspect, activities and audience that best supported these.
Interns and faciliators met weekly for a 1 hour brief, during which the students reported on their work from the week prior, presented their upcoming work, asked any questions (if they did not do so during that week by email or phone), got constructive criticism or in their cases quite some praise for some great work and benefited from 15-minute micro-courses as needed, to help them with their work, such as:
- understanding the use and limitations of AI
- uses of citations / references / resources and what is and how to avoid plagiarism
- the productive use of Word styles to structure documents for clarity, maintainability and usability (navigability and accessibility)
- Data literacy and Excel Pivot tables for Sidra since her database requires these for the effective use of Excel.
2025 Internships: Sidra’s nutrition database
Sidra hit the ground running with an ambitious project developing a nutrition database mainly surrounding dietary recommendations and sourcing for our employability programmes. The database used an anonymised list we provided from our last employability programme cohorts. Sidra was also set to write recommendations and contribute to developing the information needed to strengthen MEaP’s bid writing proposals to justify and implement the nutritional choices and expenses that she recommends. Sidra says of her placement:
“I was taught a range of new skills that have strengthened my confidence and understanding of the field. The staff supported me with patience and encouragement. The placement provided valuable hands‑on experience, and I truly enjoyed every part of it. Overall, it was meaningful, beneficial, and had a positive impact on my learning and development.
2025 Internships: Luka’s Youth Sports nutrition menus and questionnaire
Luka researched and drafted questionnaires aimed to understand the knowledge, skills, time sourcing of parents with children attending after school projects focusing on the sports field. He found and used a few of our projects, particularly those from GIFT funded by Sports England and used those and further research to establish suitable menus and questions to parents about their views on these. Luka says of his work experience:
Over the internship, I have developed my skills surrounding research and developing a research project. MEaP has been really helpful with my project with my advisor guiding me in the right direction to complete a good project. Overall I really enjoyed working with everyone at MEaP and I hope my project is useful to them for the future.
2025 Internships – Psychology Student Janna
Janna started with a review of the MEaP website, concentrating on the perspectives of new visitors. She made very useful recommendations that, we have, like for her colleagues, started to integrate to our change proposal to the board and since then to the new website that we created as a consequence.
For her brief, Janna chose to focus on the needs of and provision for parents of children in Early Care (0 to 5 years old), and did some excellent research and reporting work in that area, looking extensively at the early care provision and the gaps that needed filling, and which were most appropriate for MEaP to fill, given our mission and focus areas.
2025 Internships – Psychology Student: Ella
Ella did a great report concentrating on the parents of children in supplementary education, using Twilight Academy online school as an example. She started by checking the MEaP website and feeding back (although this is the first activity of every Psychology student as it gives them an idea of what MEaP does, helps them reconcile MEaPs focus areas with the one they would like to concentrate on, MEaP’s audiences with the ones they would like to look into and so on). She then proceeded to create persona or profiles of different types of parents, in order to establish the type of content she could create to support them. She was able to create a very few related media as the internship time is very limited, but her research and the content that results from it will be most useful for whosoever continues her work. Ella says:
I’ve really enjoyed my time as an intern at MEaP. It has allowed me to use the skills learnt in my degree so far in different ways. For example, learning more about digital marketing media and how to cater it towards different demographics of people. This isn’t something I’d usually work on but it’s allowed me to form transferable skills to add to my CV. The team are brilliant – very kind and supportive. They give excellent constructive feedback and are always there to help when needed. I also enjoyed the hybrid work environment as it was a much more malleable form of working. It was a new experience for me but I found that it was a really enjoyable, productive form of working. I’m very grateful for the time I’ve spent with MEaP.
Other 2025 internships: Mariam’s internship
During our 2025 internships, MEaP also had an additional intern from the TECHWELL 2025 employability programme. Mariam completed the TECHWELL programme with commendations and started an internship at MEaP as a Finance, Bid and Sustainability Intern, mentored by Henry Ngawoofah from MEaP and Manuella from 3E Web Media. The TECHWELL trainer and mentor, in agreement with Ingeus Restart advisers, encourages MEaP’s NEET interns to continue to apply to job offers while interning, especially once they have gone through the internship job interview and have received feedback, which is what Mariam did. Her Ingeus adviser showed her a job offer, she immediately applied and MEaP was pleased to hear that she was offered a job at the end of her second week with us! Mariam’s case study tells her whole employability story.