DPR News
Guidance Counsellor Conference
On tuesday 8th OCtober we were delighted to welcome 140 of our Guidance Counsellor colleagues to University College Cork for our annual Guidance Counsellor Conference. This year the lens was on Access, Diversity and Inclusion. The conference was jointly opened by our Deputy President and Registrar, Stephen Byrne and the Deputy President of the UCC Students' Union Hayley O'Connell Vaughan, followed by updates from our Admissions Officer, Danielle Byrne and an overview of supports and services provided by Olive Byrne, Head of the Access UCC. We were thrilled to include a student panel, expertly mediated by James Bilson (Access UCC), where four of our students shared their own experiences of Access UCC and how the supports and services have positively impacted their university experience and beyond. Really powerful stuff - thank you Brian, Barromie, Daragh and Nicole for your really open and honest engagement.
We also heard from Elaine Browne from Career Services and the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, Dr Cindy O'Shea (School of Applied Social Studies), Dr Ciara O’Toole (School of Clinical Therapies) and Dr Abina Crean (School of Pharmacy), and Professor Nuala Finnegan, Dean of Undergraduate and Postgraduate (Taught), who gave us lots of interesting updates and insights into a number of spotlighted courses and career opportunities for our students and graduates.
We were also delighted and privileged to host our very own Gillian Butler Leonard, Further Education Transition Support Officer and James Leonard, formerly of the critically acclaimed podcast, The Two Norries, and currently a PhD Scholar in the department of Sociology and Criminology in UCC. They chatted with our Head of Student Recruitment and MC extraordinaire, Lenka Forrest. We were honoured to hear their inspirational individual, and often intertwined, stories of resilience, reciprocal role-modelling and recovery, and how education was a powerful catalyst for change in their lives, helping them to overcome adversity and advocate for system change. Thank you, Gillian and James, for your courage and for challenging us to also be courageous and call out discrimination whenever and wherever we witness it.