Best activities to do towards your Go Herts application

A key part of the Go Herts Award is the activities you do. Since you have to do 100 hours of activity for a bronze award, 200 hours for a silver award and 300 hours for a gold award, you should definitely make sure you’re doing activities you enjoy or are useful to you. So if you enjoy sports and are in a society or a club, you can include that, and there are so many other activities that can count towards your evidence.

Let’s start off by looking at the activities two of our previous winners did towards their Go Herts application:

Annabelle Appleby:

“Most of my activities were based around fundraising. I was part of the Teaching Training Society and we raised money for various charities through different events and activities. I also worked at ZSL Whipsnade zoo during my years at University, where I gained so many skills.”

Zainab Karim:

“As a student I worked as a Student Ambassador and an Activator for Active Students. Both roles developed my communications skills as I was interacting with people from all over the world with different cultures, religions and age groups.”

“I was also a student rep on my course, and even a member of the Tennis team, so I developed skills like confidence, quick decision making, time management and creativity.”

Activities are listed under the five Go Herts Award Strands, these are:

• Professional Development
• Community engagement and enterprise
• Co-curricular activity
• Democracy and social responsibility
• Research and innovation

Examples of activities from each of these strands are as follows:

Professional Development

• Membership of professional bodies
• Careers workshops
• Paid part-time work, work experience or internships
• Student lead roles
• Peer mentoring
• Work shadowing

Community engagement and enterprise

• Community Garden
• Big Draw
• Enterprise initiatives
• Duke of Edinburgh Award
• Volunteering and charity involvement
• Active Students

Co-curricular activity

• CONNECT Common Reading Experience Programme
• Mentoring schemes
• Mooting/mock trails
• School co-curricular programmes
• School societies engagement and leadership
• Sporting events or clubs

Democracy and social responsibility

• Student representation
• Voting and/or standing in the Hertfordshire Students' Union elections
• Herts Debates/events
• Political engagement

Research and innovation

• Food
• Global Economy
• Health and Wellbeing
• Heritage, Cultures and Communities
• Information and Security
• Space
• Other projects underpinned by research and enquiry

These activities are just examples, if you have completed other activities that you feel can contribute towards your Go Herts Award, feel free to include them, as long as they were done during your time at University and were not assessed as part of your degree.

Providing evidence of your activities is just as important as completing your activities. In this step you basically prove that you have done the activities, making it a very key step in the Go Herts application process. You can evidence activities across all five Strands or from only one or two. You can include things you have already done during your time with us by providing evidence such as certificates, photographs, tickets, screenshots, and records of attendance.

You then reflect on how these activities have enabled you to develop your Graduate Attributes.

Find out more information about the Go Herts Award at: https://www.herts.ac.uk/life/go-herts/go-herts-award.