ANU's residential halls are small institutions: budgets, committees with portfolios, staff, and a few hundred people who live with the results. The community you test an idea on is the one you go home to.

This is the open route into the Living Lab for students who live in a hall. You bring the idea - waste, food, wellbeing, accessibility, a group that does not exist yet - but it has to be an experiment, not a plan: one thing changed deliberately, in a window short enough to finish, with something at the end that says what difference it made.

Trial new bins and signage on two floors and compare the contamination. Start the group nobody runs and test whether the residents it was for turn up.

You will learn what it takes to change something in a community you cannot leave: the people affected are the people you eat with. You will put a proposal to those who hold authority over it, reshape it when they push back, and measure whether it worked. Plenty of students can list a committee portfolio. Far fewer can say what changed because they held it.

Talk to your hall leadership first - the Head or Deputy Head, the Senior Residents, the residents' committee. You need their backing and a named person to check in with.

Then set your baseline. Record attendance, sign-ups, bin audits, whatever you plan to claim changed, before you start. Keep it anonymous: residents are neighbours, not subjects.

Agreed with your hall and set out in your Course Pathway Plan: the change you are testing and the weeks it runs, what you will measure against what baseline, and whatever the hall needs to keep it going.

At the end, a short account of what you tried, what changed, and what next year's committee should keep - given to the hall, not only to the course.

Recommended to students who live in a hall, hold or want a committee portfolio, and can name one thing about hall life that ought to work better.

Two cautions. Doing your portfolio well is service, not an experiment. And hall years are short with total turnover, so pick a window you can close and agree who owns the work after handover.