I’ll start by admitting that writing my first post back during ISB wasn’t too strategic...

But here it goes anyway!

After flying straight from holiday with my family to Budapest for a very hectic week in Central Europe, visiting SUs and universities, I landed straight back into the madness.

I know you’re more interested in in the Europe trip over anything else, but I’m going to save both of us some time and just give you the link to the Bath Time article I wrote on it: https://unibathtime.co.uk/2025/01/27/why-was-i-in-central-europe-and-why-should-you-care/.

As usual, I’m more than happy to discuss any of these points in more detail or explain a bit more the rationale behind us going on the trip. Hopefully, by now you know how to find me! (1E 3.13 A is my office and supresident@bath.ac.uk is my email).

Right.

After the trip, the first week back was a combination of interviews for our head of Student Voice, and a new SU post, titled Strategic Project Manager, which is a fixed-term, 18-month role designed to support the senior team in implementing projects related to the strategy. These roles are beneficial to students for different reasons. The head of Voice is a role we’ve always had, and it’s the person that looks after everything related to representation and campaigns, and all the subdivisions of that (so stuff like education, EDI, international students, and a lot more). This is definitely a non-exhaustive description of it, so please do ask more if you need to. But essentially, this is a person that supports your officers in every turn, so it was essential that we found a good person for it (and we did! More on this soon). The strategic project one is important to you because it is a person that will make the SU run more efficiently, help us focus our resources better, and alleviate capacity for existing staff. So perhaps a bit more indirectly, but it will certainly improve your experience on the ground.

After these interviews (both the roles took a whole day of interviews), I was in town for a whole day attending graduation ceremonies and speaking at some of them. The Friday after was mostly spent catching up on literally hundreds of emails and planning ahead to the next semester.

The whole week after was mostly recurring meetings, catch ups with people, and nominations committee (which is the sub-committee for the university council that looks after allocating people to senior places). The main bit last and this week is about our Together We Shape Tomorrow work – which though I’ve mentioned in here at some other point, I’ll still give a link for you to familiarise yourself with what it is: https://www.thesubath.com/twst/.

We presented it at University Executive Board (UEB) last week, and we’ve had a few follow-up meetings after to look at how to get the ball rolling. The next big step is a launch for university staff on Wednesday this week. After that, we’ll do an online launch for students. But at any point before or after that we’re happy to answer questions about it. I will also be publishing a blog on Wonkhe about it, to make other SUs and universities hear about it too!

I will probably have more to say on this very soon, so I’ll leave the update here for now. Hope ISB is going well and that you’re thrilled to be starting the second semester of the year already. In the meantime, stay warm and be kind to one another.

Much love,

Jiji x