William Ng is professional services staff at QMUL. He has worked for a long time with the School of Mathematical Sciences and is now helping shape student support within EECS. William recommends Lara Alcock’s How to Study for a Mathematics Degree as a resource for students navigating the transition from school to university — covering everything from time management to the shift in how mathematics is taught and assessed.
Tell me about the sort of problem you’ve been working on day-to-day
The honest answer, especially with the restucturing of professional services is that things got fragmented. When a student misses an exam, or needs extenuating circumstances considered, or has a progression issue, those things are all connected but they weren’t necessarily dealt with by the same team. We’re trying to reconnect them with a student focus at the centre. Every student should receive care and attention, hard with large classes, but that doesn’t always mean each student gets the same support. I want student support to be a little more proactive not reactive.
Can you unpack that for me? What do you mean by proactive student support?
The goal is to step in before someone needs extenuating circumstances or fails an exam. That’s genuinely hard with large cohorts. We were tracking attendance, which helps, but it misses students who are turning up but are still struggling quietly. So we’ve been piloting something more direct: proactively reaching out and having one-to-one conversations, not just with students who are visibly failing, but a broader range. Different students have very different problems, and you only find that out by talking to them. Face-to-face contact, it sounds almost old-fashioned, but the evidence from our work in SMS is that one-to-one meetings produce real, proactive change. Students feel heard. They share things they’d never put in a form or raise in a lecture. We’re trying to bring that approach into EECS.
How does that work in practice? You can’t meet all students.
We reach out to students, obviously we can’t meet all of them. Some are identified to us for various reasons, low marks, low attendance and so on. Others we just select at random to get a sample of people with different needs and experiences. The meetings are one-on-one, we found this just works better. Different students have different problems and they may not be comfortable talking in a group. They also have different needs. Some students want a full student experience, student societies, socialising, being part of the university, others prefer to focus solely on the task of getting a degree. We found some things that you might not expect. Some of our “low attendance” students were not attending because they found the classes too easy or boring but they were being flagged as “at risk of failing”, they could comfortably get very high grades but weren’t being distinguished from students at risk of dropping out of the degree.
What sort of things are you doing for the students?
It sounds obvious but some simply don’t know how to study. The step from school to university is a tough one. They were sitting there in the lecture, passively, not really interacting or absorbing the material, not knowing how to maximise the experience. Students now have notes before the lecture so it did not occur to some to annotate the notes for example. In school many were in a highly structured environment where knew where they would be at every hour of the school day. Moving from that to a university environment was a hard step for some. They did not know how to structure a working day so some would work very long hours but not necessarily be very productive within that time. Some international students felt pressure from home to work long hours even when that can be very counter productive.
Let’s talk about disability and neurodivergence. What have you found there?
This is an area where I think we have genuinely helped. We made a point of meeting individually with every student who had a diagnosis: ADHD, dyslexia, and others. For students with ADHD in particular, a lot of the work came down to study planning. These students often work very differently, some are most productive in the evenings, for instance. So rather than imposing a standard template, we try to help them build a plan that works with their rhythms, not against them.
What we found was striking: many students simply did not know what support they were entitled to. They didn’t know they could apply for additional time in exams. They didn’t understand what the “cover note” on their work was for. (This is a note that is for the person marking exams to flag that, for example, grammar in question answers may be imperfect.) Some perceived the “cover note” negatively, as though it was saying they personally were problem rather than ensuring fair treatment.
For some, espeically international students, they felt the diagnosis was associated with a stigma. This is very real, and we have to acknowledge it. For some students, a diagnosis of ADHD or dyslexia carries a cultural weight that it doesn’t in the UK context. The conversation has to be handled with care. We found that simply explaining what a diagnosis means in practical terms (“this is what extra time in an exam looks like, this is how the cover note works, this is what disability services can offer”) helped demystify it. Some students were then willing to engage with those services.
What about gender equity? Is that something you’ve looked at?
At undergraduate level, the gender balance (particularly in mathematics) has actually become quite good. But at postgraduate level, it’s still heavily male-dominated, and we don’t fully understand why. Role models may be part of it although there are strong female role models in mathematics and engineering it’s still not as common.
You mentioned students who are blind, can you say more there?
We haven’t quite cracked it. Supporting students with visual impairments in a highly mathematical and technical discipline presents real challenges that we haven’t yet found adequate answers to. That’s something we need to work on, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.