Your guide to Sprint <3

Yes, I can imagine what you are probably thinking but don’t worry, this is not a beginners’ guide to sprinting.

It is, however, a guide to one of those extracurricular activities I promised to blog about.

Ladies and gentlemen, (well in this case ladies but you will understand why in a moment) I have decided to write about one of my favourite programmes at Leicester; Sprint.

It is a women’s development programme for undergraduate women. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to take part in this programme last year as it had a massive impact in my life. Sprint introduced me to LinkedIn, Padlet and the ways of the cat and the dog (the idea behind this, is that when networking, people will behave in two ways, like cats or dogs). It also gave me a good support network and a lot of techniques to help me organise myself. I also got assigned mentor afterwards which I appreciated as I didn’t have one before.

Just like with everything else in life, with Sprint, you get as much as you put in. I know from my experience that not a lot of students had a follow up with their mentors so if you do decide to take part in this please follow up with your mentors. I can’t stress enough the benefits that this will bring if you are fully committed to it. After the programme, I went for an appointment with my mentor and we discussed my Development Action Plan (DAP) and just having someone to help and support me through this journey encouraged me to take active steps to fulfil everything I put down on my DAP. As much as I don’t like to admit it, I know that I would have probably ignored my DAP if it wasn’t for the fact that I had to check up with my mentor. It is because of that that I had one of the most productive summers of my life but that is a post for another day.

During the programme, we used a lot of post-it notes for the exercises, I came back home with a folder filled with them. I loved using those post-it notes throughout the programme but my favourite thing about Sprint was taking that blue folder with all that sweet information home (I get easily excited). The folder had all the information we covered in the programme alongside a lot of things that we did not have the time to consider during our sessions. It saved me having to write things down so I loved that folder because of it.

I applied for Sprint because I wanted to become better, I wanted to improve on my areas for development and Sprint seemed to be the programme that would help me do that. Having finished the programme, I can say that although there weren’t any drastic changes to my lifestyle and it didn’t help me sort through everything I initially expected, it did give me the techniques and support to figure it all out myself. It is an on going process and you do need to have patience. You can’t transform your life with only four sessions but you can apply what you learn every day and that is what I have been doing so far.

Truth be told, there are lots of other events and programmes at Leicester that would probably help you as much as Sprint. You could easily achieve similar results. The difference with Sprint is that it specifically targets undergraduate women (springboard has other programmes for different target audiences click here for more info). It helps undergraduate women explore various issues in a safe environment with the opportunity to discuss them further in their home groups. I found out a lot about myself and discovered a lot of things that I need to work on to improve my life and get to where I want to be. So, if this is what you want to achieve then I strongly recommend signing up for this opportunity. You can find more information here.

Like always, thank you for taking the time to read my post and feel free share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Until next time,

Cintya 🙂