Introducing the new UCL Student Storytellers!

UCL students walking through campus
UCL students walking through campus
Now in its third year, UCL Student Storytellers (previously the UCL Student Journalism Scheme) offers five new brilliant writers and communicators the chance to make their mark on UCL life.

Five UCL students have been given a fantastic opportunity to join UCL VPEE’s UCL Student Storytellers - a year-long paid training programme which gives students a chance to build a portfolio writing articles for UCL Student News and produce longand short-form content for other channels. 

The successful candidates won their places on our 2024-25 programme after a rigorous selection process, which saw over a hundred applicants compete for five places.

Over the course of the year, the students will be paid to write for UCL Student News, and get the chance to polish their pitching, writing and editing skills with training from UCL’s Media Relations team and professional working journalists.

Meet the third cohort of UCL Student Storytellers: Zoe Dahse, Hermione Chan, Mark Bessoudo, Hannah Peltier and Bathsheba Lockwood-Brook.

I am a final year History with Spanish student. I am an aspiring journalist and have been involved with UCL’s Pi Media throughout my time as an undergraduate. Currently, I am President of the society and really enjoying leading my talented team across Pi Online, Mag and TV. I love reading and telling stories, and hope to improve my storytelling skills in relation to UCL life and to promote the development of the Storytellers’ Scheme further. Looking forward to start writing! My name is Hermione, and I’m currently a second-year English student. Having been raised in a small, unknown region in China called Macau, I’m extremely aware of the importance of representation and how that impacts our development as young consumers of media and the news. Highlighting obscure stories and bringing lesser-known issues to light in the most objective, comprehensive manner has always been a goal of mine, and this scheme is a perfect way to further my expertise in this area! 

Although a big portion of my involvement with journalism is through video form, I’m excited to develop my writing and pitching skills, which are core components of being a journalist. This scheme will definitely push me to explore the many hidden nooks and crannies of university life and allow me to make the most of my time here in London! 

I’m currently completing a one-year MA in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture. I’m originally from Canada but have been in London since 2019. My background is more on the technical side - I have degrees in environmental engineering and solar building engineering - and I’ve worked for many years as an urban sustainability consultant and researcher, but I’ve also always enjoyed the humanities and liberal arts, too. That’s what first got me interested in writing, I think. Writing has been a tool for me to formulate my opinions on a wide range of issues and a way for me to communicate them to others. 

While I have already written for various publications (on topics from  artificial intelligence  and  cycling in cities  to  Google Street View street photography  and my love for  Canadian donuts ) I mostly write for the pleasure of it. I don’t have any formal journalism training. That’s why I’m so excited to have been selected as one of UCL’s Student Storytellers. I’m looking forward to learning from journalists, interviewing academic researchers and other people at UCL who are involved in interesting initiatives to uncover the stories behind them, and then working with the UCL Communications Team to get the stories out to a wider audience. 

In my free time I like to explore London on foot and by bicycle, watch standup comedy and volunteer at the  Sainsbury Archive  in the London Museum. I also run the (extremely niche)  @street.cola  Instagram account as a fun side project. 

Hello! I’m a born-and-raised Canadian undergraduate student in my third year of Nutrition and Medical Sciences. As course-related knowledge takes up more and more previously unooccupied brain space, my free-time writing grows increasingly academic. Though my pen guides me through numerous areas of interest, the ember that burns in my heart for the subject of my degree, nutrition, deserves the spotlight. Journalism within the nutrition field is often heavily sensationalised, obscuring research and fact behind marketing and bias. My perspective on nutrition embraces the psychology of eating behaviour, the historical evolution of food attitudes, and the government policy determining product accesibility. I hope to inspire well-rounded and thought-provoking discussions through my writing, ones which reflect the complex intersectionality between our physiology, our behaviour, our environment, and our health.

I’m a part-time student from Sheffield, on the Medieval and Renaissance Studies MA programme. At the moment I’m exploring medieval and contemporary pilgrimage via the Refugee Walks project, which invokes the British landscape to communicate the experiences of asylum seekers to a national audience. 

I’m currently writing for Era magazine, and have several exhibition reviews forthcoming in other publications. There’s plenty to be found on the London cultural (and countercultural) scene that intersects with UCL student interests; in my writing for the scheme, I’m particularly looking forward to digging into the vibrant creative community in UCL and beyond. 

Alongside journalism, I write fiction and poetry, which has been recognised by several prizes, including the Guernsey Literary Festival and the Christopher Tower Poetry Competition. I’m currently working on a novel about megaliths and long-term nuclear waste disposal. I also write a perfume Substack called STENCH - watch this space! 
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