Education Officer Blog

This weekend, we will see the SU reunion (love the accidental pun there) light up campus. Me and Jiji have been digging through the archives especially, and it really got me thinking about all those who have come before – and so, hopefully to the delight of our super archivists at the Library, I give you, Amber nerds out about her Education Officers.

Ruqia was my first Education Officer, and she was well and truly an icon. I have a core memory of doing my academic rep training in Chancellor’s Building, and her ending it with a rousing “lets !! lets fuck this up guys!” to great cheers. She was the first in line for when COVID hit, empowering us as reps to seek information on what exactly was going to happen with our education, and at least from where I was standing as a fresher, she handled it so well. If you haven’t got Ruqia on your radar yet, I want to know how you’ve missed her. She has this just gorgeously unparalleled insight into the experiences of Black students and can explain anything from the importance of mental health initiatives to the awarding gap with ease.

Next comes Annie – and as this is still deep in COVID, all is digital, including everything hosted for us reps. At this point, I am a faculty rep for HSS after (accidentally) taking on way more than the dozen or so students on my integrated masters course gave me the confidence to run. I will always associate Annie with faculty forums, something we started doing again in my first year as officer, to link together academic and faculty reps. If you ever try to look up what my job consists of, there is Annie (and also me on a zoom call). Annie gets my props for working through it all during a pandemic that seemingly would never end, and then choosing to stay another year (albeit as President).

After that we get Jacob – Jacob was Science faculty rep the same time I was in the role for HSS, and so when he ran he had my full support. The similarity in what we are interested in is unnerving – if I ever have a problem, I search through the rambling online archives that is the sueducation email and there it is. An email from Jacob to somebody explaining exactly what the situation was in 2021, or the process to do something, or a report to Education Advisory Board. It is magical, it is dazzling, it is Jacob.

Finally, we get Julia. You have to give props to her for keeping the role in the Science faculty before I wrestled it back to HSS, but even more so, her year was just hit after hit. At this point, we are finally out of COVID, which means she got hit with a hundred and one acronyms – TEF, APP, MAB, the WORKS. Despite all of this, she maintained her love for High School Musical, and as I write this, there is a picture of her edited into a HSM puzzle somewhere in a house in Oldfield, courtesy of the power of powerpoint – don’t ever say my editing skills aren’t the coolest xoxo

PLAIN LINKS

Ruqia Wonkhe article - https://wonkhe.com/blogs/a-menifesto-for-black-mental-health-should-matter-to-he/