Are you passionate about writing and student life? UCL’s Student Storytellers scheme offers paid opportunities to develop your skills, create content for the student community and gain writing experience.
The UCL Student Storytellers scheme is managed by our Communications team. It is designed to fit around your studies and allow you to upskill in writing for different audiences, mainly the UCL student community.
We are recruiting five Student Storytellers for paid work producing written content for UCL communications and to take on paid work for teams across UCL when opportunities arise throughout the academic year.
The scheme is open to all’UCL students (from first-year undergraduates to PhD students) on all courses and will run until June 2026.
The UCL Student Storytellers’ role
You will work with our Student Communications team to write to a brief, as well as potentially working with our social media team on Instagram stories and other short-form content. By the end of the programme, you’ll have example articles for your portfolio written for UCL Student News.
You’ll have support from our Communications team to turn briefs into stories and content that will be read by the UCL community.
Responsibilities
- Respond to requests for articles.
- Write engaging articles aimed at UCL students based on a brief.
- Take on feedback from the Communications team and the staff member who has commissioned you.
Person Specification
- Ability to produce clear, concise and engaging copy.
- Ability to work collaboratively and flexibly within a team and independently.
- Excellent written English.
- Manage and meet publishing deadlines.
- Ability to use Microsoft Teams.
- Content about student life in London
- Content about student wellbeing
- Content about student communities at UCL
- The piece needs to be relevant in some way to UCL
- Your audience is your fellow UCL students
- It needs to be timely and topical
- Include who you would approach for a quote or interview, if relevant to your idea.
- University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT (0) 20 7679 2000
Payment
You will be paid as a casual worker. You will be paid £14.85 per hour of work completed.
For Student Storyteller content, a 500-word article is expected to take around 4-5 hours of writing and editing.
Payment is made one month in arrears on the last working day of the month and is administered by Unitemps. For every hour that you work, you will accrue £2.59 holiday pay. Details of how to claim payment will be given to you during the introductory session.
Timescale and hours
Students on the UCL Student Storytellers programme are current UCL students employed on a zero-hour contract to write articles for UCL channels.
On this scheme, writing articles will be the bulk of the role. Storytellers are expected to complete a training session and write a minimum of one article a term.
If you are a Tier 4/Student visa holder, please read more information on the hours you are allowed to work per week.
How to apply
We are looking for great writers who are curious about what’s happening at UCL, want to improve their content skills and get paid for doing so.
If you wish to apply, you will need to complete the application form before Sunday 30 November, 11:59pm. The application requests a link to or an upload of one or two examples of your (non-academic) writing, and includes the following questions:
1. Why do you want to be a Student Storyteller and what makes you suitable for this role?
2. Write a one-paragraph response to the following message from the UCL Communications team:
"We are looking for written content (e.g. a 500 word article) about one of the following:
Please tell us which one you would like to write about, and give a brief overview of the content. Please include a title, a sub-heading, and a one-paragraph overview/synopsis. Please make clear whether you would this would be a long-form article and/or short-form content (you can suggest both); and which channels the short-form content might go out on."
Please bear in mind:
Please complete the application form with your responses.
Deadline for entry: 11.59pm, Sunday 30 November 2025.
Please note, whilst AI can be a useful tool, we prefer you don’t use tools such as Chat-GPT for your application.
If you have any questions, please.