The pharmacy programmes at the University of Manchester continuously promote the widening participation agenda and equality and diversity initiatives. The programmes recruit students with diverse cultural backgrounds and international students each year.

We regard international students play a vital role in the richness of cultural, diversity, and intellectual development in pharmacy programmes. Equally, we recognise that international students face many challenges, such as culture shock, homesickness, loneliness, finance, vias, and employability issues on top of the academic stress.

Limited but emerging literature found pharmacy students’ sense of belonging and engagement with the programme is closely related to their academic performance. Therefore, we believe that tackling the isolation and integrating student cohorts is essential to enhancing the student experience and teaching quality assurance.

Therefore, we develop this blog site as a platform to promote a peer network for international students to share experiences and build connections between student peers. The target audience is the international students, expressly but not limited to the pharmacy students.

We hope to support international students and widen pharmacy students’ international scope. We also hope you support our aspirations and would support and engage with this forum by contributing to the blog articles or subscribing to our blog.

 

Dr Li-Chia Chen

Senior Lecturer in Pharmacoepidemiology

Institute of Teaching and Learning Fellow 2021-22

Pharmacy International Student Experience Lead

 

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