This reflective piece, delves into the narratives and experiences of students Chris, Aoife, Jordan, and Karolina; participants in a student-staff partnership aimed at enhancing the first-year undergraduate experience. This student-staff partnership came to fruition through a fellowship awarded by the National Technological University TransfOrmation for Recovery and Resilience project (N-TUTORR), an innovative collaboration across the Technological Higher Education sector to transform the student experience.. The partnership project was titled; ‘SETU Includes U: ‘Facilitating Friendships’ Induction for Year 1 Students’. The students-staff partnership team worked together to design and deliver a sustainable induction day framework and these induction days were ran by the team in the Department of Nursing and Health Care at the South East Technological University (SETU). To capture the lived experiences of the students involved in the partnership process, an adapted version of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle has been used as a framework for this reflectice piece. Their accounts provide a multifaceted view of the complexities of the partnership process, from initial apprehensions to eventual triumphs, and offers valuable insights to the lived experiences regarding student staff partnerships in higher education, with implications for future practice.
Maher et al. (2025) studied this question.