Well hello hello my loves. Its that time of year – freshers coming in, the dread of my birthday being the busiest for working (about 19 days in a row thanks to the moving in weekend!), and manifesto plotting. Now, while I have no clue who will be moving into my corridor and having to hear me sing embarrassingly loud and off pitch in the shower, nor what to do with my birthday (but Fresher’s Ball looks nothing short of promising), I DO KNOW my -vibes- for the year.

These are split into big ol’ overarching themes, with outcomes under them.

Firstly, all students can access their education in a way that is equitable and fair.

This means you know your rights for when things “go wrong” – you know what support is available, how to access it, and all the policies, processes and procedures surrounding them are in plain English. This includes the production of the current labour of love that is the IMC phrase bank.

If you are a disabled student, you should understand how to seek support for enforcing your DAP, guidance should be available to academics to help support and facilitate you, and you should have more access to spaces on campus – both physical and in terms of sensory friendly spaces.

Finally, your lecture recordings need to be legible, consistent, and easy to access. Getting consistent lecture recordings has been hard enough, and when we get these into your hands, we want you to be able to read boards, see laser pointers, and have access to accurate subtitles.

We’ve already started on point 2, but if you haven’t heard yet, we are doing a rep review !

There is so much we want to achieve here, so in bullet-points for your ease:

• We want to ensure you always know who to go to, by making a “cheat sheet”
• We want you to be able to get involved in research
• We want to revise SSLCs to ensure they work for you – standardising structures, approaches, and output (RAG rated action trackers anyone?)
•  We want to make sure you can get the most out of peer support and form academic communities – bringing together academic reps, peer mentors, an PALs
• We want to give you physical space on the first floor of the edge !

Thirdly, we want to make sure you feel your work is fulfilling.

In our rep survey, the theme that kept coming up over and over is that you superstars do what you do because you adore making a change, and we want to boost you up for this.

We want to make sure that both big and small wins are celebrated, we want you to be identifiable on campus, we want to showcase your achievements, and we want you to get cold hard credit for it.

This isn’t to say we want you to deliver the world, we want to make sure that you and your cohort know what is possible to solve and at what level – because I  want to make sure that you aren’t left chasing dead ends while you’re also balancing studying.

Finally, we want you to be knowledgeable, and for your expectations to be fulfilled. We want to ensure you know what you will learn, how you will be assessed, ad how feedback will help you improve.

We want the fabled annotated past papers and assessments, accessible feedback that helps you improve your process and criticality, be able to access moodle pages to help you choose units, and identify truly essential reading.

This has all been based on your super feedback last year – directly to me, in faculty forums and academic councils, and through a massive SSLC minutes review. I really hope to do y’all proud this year, cause I sure as anything know I’m ever proud of y’all.