Hello everyone! 

Somehow, it’s already been two weeks since my last update, so here goes the second one... 

After the graduation madness, the next week was all about replying to the hundreds (and I’m not exaggerating) of emails that I missed during that week. But getting back to the routine was easy enough with the whole officer team on the same teamwork mindset (insert heart eye emoji here).  

My last two weeks were a mix of meetings with different university departments (among them registry, careers, campus services, and my first time at the university-SU joint executive group). These meetings are very helpful because it helps us meet the people in charge of different parts of a student’s life. This means I know who to contact if there’s something that needs improving/changing.  

I also had the opportunity to have informal conversations with the candidates for the position of director of sustainability. This is a new position within the university that the SU previously helped lobby for. Having the opportunity to meet the candidates and telling them the student side of things was extremely helpful.  

Finally, I went to the Lead and Change NUS conference in Roehampton! This was three full days of training sessions for officers from across the UK that were aimed at giving us tools for our new roles within our SUs. Not only was it very interesting, but it was lovely to meet officers from so many different SUs. And though I could talk about the conference for pages, some stories are best left untold... Also, I think it might be helpful for me to briefly tell you what the NUS is, and why historically we’ve been a part of it.  

NUS stands for National Union of Students. Over 440 SUs across the UK are members of it, which gives this confederation the ability to lobby – on a national level – for student interests. This is why we are a part of NUS. The opportunity to have a body to represent different SUs and build a connection among them is quite useful. However, we do pay 30,000£ to be affiliated to the NUS. This has caused some people to question if being a part of the NUS is worth it. I wouldn’t want to influence your own opinion, so I invite you to go the SU website and search for ‘NUS’ so you can read more about it and decide what you think. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have any comments or questions about it!  

I’ll leave the update here, before I rant about SU history and why I find it so interesting. Thank you for coming back to read another one of my updates and again, please comment or send me a message if you want to have a chat about anything that I mentioned! 

Come back for another update in a couple of weeks.  

Much love, 

Jiji x