She could have been a war correspondent, but instead Gemma Whitwell, Assistant Director of Residential Wellbeing, has helped to direct more (mostly) peaceful operations. Gemma talks Residential Wellbeing, recalls the highs and lows of managing an airport, and describes her recent recruitment to the shore crew of Weston-super-Mare’s lifeboat station.
I’m Assistant Director of the Residential Wellbeing Service. We offer wellbeing support to our nearly 10,000 residential students – mostly first years, but any students who live in our residences and need an extra bit of support. Our students’ main focus is studying towards getting their degree or other award, but they’re also here to enjoy the social life and living independently, maybe for the first time. We want to ensure that they do, and that they reach their full potential at Bristol, in all aspects of their lives.
From beer to coffee
Different cohorts seem to face different challenges: one year we’ll see a big increase in students experiencing, say, anxiety and depression, the next year it could be eating disorders. The effects of the pandemic certainly haven’t finished making themselves felt: our current first-year students were around 13 during the first lockdown, and I think we’re still seeing that lack of social interaction play out. My heart really goes out to these bright young people who sometimes struggle with various demons.
When I was a student at the University of Leeds almost 30 years ago, our social lives revolved around the Students’ Union bar and other city pubs, and I couldn’t tell you where the gym was! My personal experience is that students are a lot more health-conscious these days: much more likely to grab a coffee or a green tea. They’re also a lot more environmentally conscious: they worry about climate change much more than I did.
Career moves
I wanted to be a war correspondent. I can remember when I was seven, watching Michael Buerk reporting from the Ethiopia famine and saying to my mum and dad, ‘I want to do what he does’. I studied journalism, which I loved – and I was lucky enough to interview Michael Buerk twice! – but when I started working on a local paper, I couldn’t see past doing the boring work to get to the good stuff.
I worked as a travel agent, then at the University of Bristol for a while, before I applied for a job with the ground transportation team at Bristol Airport. After two years I was promoted to airport manager, where I stayed for seven years.
If I’m ever finding a workday challenging at the University, I think back to my time at the airport, and it puts everything into perspective. As airport manager, I was responsible for the safety and wellbeing of the hundreds of staff working in and around the terminal building, and the 25,000 passengers who travelled through it each day. There were real highs and lows: brilliant shifts where everything was buzzing – and seeing Prince Harry with a massive hangover was fun – but some difficult shifts as well. I did CPR on four people during my time there – sadly I lost three and saved one. You don’t forget that sort of thing.
Boats, shouts and banter
I started volunteering with the RNLI at Weston-super-Mare in 2024 – a great charity to be part of. After six months of walking my dogs past the lifeboat station every Sunday morning and having the operations manager – who I’d worked with at the airport – asking ‘When are you coming to join us?’, I ran out of excuses and finally said ‘Yeah, go on then’.
I’m their Admin Officer and I’m also on the shore crew: we get the boats prepped and launched for the boat crew, then we wait until they come back in, ready to respond to any casualty need. I love the emergency response side of it, and the banter and camaraderie.
We train every Wednesday night and Sunday morning. Weston Lifeboat Station has about 50 shouts a year, mostly between June and September, although we saw quite a few over this last winter. Attending a shout at 4 am in January is not for the faint-hearted! About half of them are related to mental health, so that links into my work at the University.
With courage, nothing is impossible
The golden thread through my career has been that I do everything in my power to make the customer journey as great as it can possibly be – whether it’s a passenger at the airport or a student at the University – and to make everybody’s life just a little bit better.
There’s another thread, too: when people tell me ‘that’s impossible’, I take it as a challenge. I’m proud of having pushed through a few things in particular: I wrote Bristol Airport’s Winter Weather Response Plan, for example, which they’re still using today.
I’m also proud of the headway we’ve made in introducing changes to the Residential Wellbeing Service. We’ve improved a lot of things, both for students and for our staff. And I’m very proud of the Residential Wellbeing team – they really do work their socks off.