Sumayyah Azhar

Newly employed and currently juggling 3 jobs. Operations executive at Ayda (a start up), visitors services assistant at rich mix, research assistant and writer at LIS.

My final year capstone project emerged out of my real life experience and conversations with friends. I identified student housing as an issue within my own life, and my peers’ lives. I then read some literature and found that student transience (moving from place to place) can affect belonging and wider local community cohesion.

My study was exploratory sequential. This means that I wanted to explore the terrain before explaining why that could be. My qual phase was an ethnography of my friends homes, and interviews with them about the places they live. From then coding my field notes, I found six key aspects of student transience that could affect community belonging and cohesion. I then created a survey and sent it out to as many people living in London as I could. I then used multiple and single linear regression modelling to assess which of these aspects were statistically significant, of which four were.

Uniquely, alongside your research paper, LIS requires you to have a “real world output”. Mine was a behavioural campaign strategy using the four significant factors to target what universities could do to aid this problem. I got a first grade on both outputs, and as such a first overall on the capstone.

East London is one of the best places in the country. There’s so many interesting places, so many new experiences. Rich mix is an events space and cinema that’s around the corner from LIS that I went to a bunch! They value the importance of culture and community in throwing an event (and now I work there too!).

I think it’s so important to gain exposure to the amazing cultures and communities that east London has to offer, it’s a real strong suit of it. And as an LIS student, personal lives shouldn’t be siloed. East London is a intertangled mess of integration, and I love it.