Educational program for students
To facilitate collaboration and address health challenges, UMCG and Lifelines, together with the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health, have developed an educational program for students: Aletta’s Regional Year Challenge. With this program, students work together with organizations in the region to address health challenges effectively. Students from diverse backgrounds can participate, allowing everyone to contribute their expertise. The annual outcomes of the program can bring about changes for the benefit of the health of our citizens, providing more healthy years for everyone.
Aletta's Regional Year Challenge is designed to provide students with an opportunity to engage with real-world data within the realm of their educational program. It is a supplementary program aimed at gaining experience with data, and fostering students' critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and research capabilities.
Key highlights
The program offers a variety of activities and these are some of the key highlights
- Yearly Challenge Theme
Each year, together with partners from within the region, a relevant, topical theme is chosen. Students are encouraged to think creatively, collaborate effectively, and develop innovative and data-driven solutions for questions or sub-challenges within the realm of this theme.
- Real-World Data
The program provides students with access to a rich dataset from Lifelines which includes various variables that are related to to theme. This dataset can support their educational or research projects and empowers them to explore, analyze, and draw meaningful insights. - Networking Opportunities
Aletta's Regional Year Challenge organizes various meet-ups, workshops, and networking events throughout the program. These events allow students to interact with professionals, researchers, and fellow participants, fostering a sense of community and providing valuable networking opportunities.
Theme & Dataset
Every year, Lifelines prepares a dataset that matches the theme and allows students to work on the challenge with relevant data. This can be data on physical activity, nutrient intake, lifestyle, mental disorder, and subjective health regarding quality of life and stress. This will be combined with the data from previous years, creating an even richer dataset. Students can use the data in a variety of ways, using different approaches, ranging from studying what geographical areas could be suitable for performing qualitative field research, to simple statistical analyses, to building interactive games or websites and anything in between.
Our goal
The goal of the challenge is to engage students in the challenges related to Healthy Ageing. Existing collective knowledge is shared and made available so that they can address regional challenges. By involving students in existing challenges, they will be engaged in the developments and challenges of current and future society. Students learn about Healthy Ageing content, but also acquire new skills by working with the dataset. Due to inclusivity, guidance, and accessibility of the challenge, it applies to students from vocational, higher professional, and academic education. Students learn to work with the Real World dataset, which allows them to positively distinguish themselves from other students. These various factors contribute to aligning education with the job market.
Another intended effect is the regional collaboration between institutions, (semi-)government, education, and businesses in the region. By working with one or more clients, students get a taste of actual challenges in their future line of work. Clients also get exposed to the innovative and creative ideas of the students. This interaction strengthens the regional collaboration between education, (semi-) government, and the business sector. Regional collaboration, in turn, contributes to the position as a Healthy Ageing region
Testimonials
- "I would definitely recommend participating in the program to others, because it is such a unique challenge and requires you to think differently and work with dedicated data." - Quinn, student
- "I have learned to work together, communicate, work out new ideas and concepts and I have learned to work with a data set." - Aysha, student
- "From other educations that participated in the challenge, I have learned to do data research." - Bouke, student
Partners of Aletta's Regional Year Challenge
