Wednesday 15-11-2023 - 12:12

Hi everyone, it’s Shaquita your Vice President Education at JMSU! It has been a great start to the academic year, and I have loved chatting with so many students. I’m excited to share what I’ve been up to since my second year of Vice Presidency began. 

July  

My first month back in office was all about training to ensure I have all the up-to-date knowledge and guidance about the university and the student movement, this included training with the National Union of Students where I got to meet hundreds of other officers from the North and share ideas and campaigns. This was a great time for our officer team to bond whilst processing in Graduation ceremonies and working closely together. We took time to prioritise our shared goals and values which is where we came up with our group priorities: WAVES which stands for Wellbeing, Amplifying the student voice, Visibility + Engagement, Employability and Students at the heart. These are the values that will drive the decisions and campaigns for our officer team this year! I also got the amazing opportunity to appear on BBC Radio Merseyside where I spoke about the value of degrees and how important university is as a holistic experience for personal growth, this was the highlight of the month for me. 

August 

In August I took some much-needed time of to recuperate and went on holiday, a personal highlight of mine was getting engaged (woop woop)! After the most amazing holiday, I was excited to get back and start planning for the academic year ahead. This included planning for freshers’ events, reviewing course rep training based on feedback from previous reps, and starting to plan Black History Month. We also got our results from the National Student Survey in which we were ranked the 4th best Students' Union in the Northwest! I worked closely with the Liverpool City Region Combined authorities to help them understand why race is important and share lived experience in hopes of creating better opportunities for our students, this was through LJMUs reciprocal mentoring programme which I highly recommend you check out if you get the chance. Alongside this I went back to my regular meetings including Academic Board and Education student experience and shared a round up report of the JMSU academic year before starting to focus on the 23/24 academic year and I got newly appointed to the Board of Governors, so I now represent students at the highest level possible within the university. 

September 

This month is where all the action happened, it was so nice seeing students back on campus and see the city come back alive again! I attended multiple Freshers’ events including Freshers Fair and gathered loads of feedback from students it was very important to be visible during this period specifically so that students could put a face to the name and build a relationship with me. I started working on breaking down the NSS results and seeing how we can improve the student experience further and realised the correlation between course satisfaction and academic societies and made that a new priority in addition to my manifesto. I continued to plan black history month and also began recruiting course representatives for the new year ahead and began training sessions with our new academic representation and communities coordinator Lauren. The interaction and engagement this year in training has been amazing and we are looking forward to additional training sessions to enhance students’ development throughout the student leadership programme.

October 

Black history month was in October which was a campaign I worked hard to improve based on students’ feedback, we planned 6 different events for all students to attend. The events included: Two movie nights, a book launch talk, anti-slavery day walking tour, a talk with Kim Johnson MP and an allyship workshop. The events had good engagement and although the talk with Kim Johnson MP was cancelled, we have arranged to have this later on in the year so watch this space. I began doing the behind the scenes work on bringing my manifesto to life and worked closely with our VP Community and Wellbeing Alexandria and the student voice team to create a transport paper which included loads of barriers students face with transport and had some suggestions on what we can do to help which we presented to the university at their cost of living working group which was really well received and so we will be presenting this to the universities executive leadership team next to turn our feedback into action. I also sat on the interview panel for our new community leaders who will play a vital part in amplifying the student voice you can join our communities and make some change whilst socialising and making friends here. 

November and beyond 

• Getting the decolonising the curriculum pledge online and increasing awareness. 
• Gathering feedback from students regarding assessment season and supporting students to reduce burnout across campus 
• Working with course representatives to support them in their new roles and appoint school representatives whilst working with the university to make this a paid role. 

Get involved 

I hope you enjoyed catching up with what I’ve been up to, a lot of officer work happens behind the scenes so if you would like to know more about my manifesto or academic representation as a whole please feel free to contact me or set up a meeting with me! Don’t forget that nominations for full time officer roles are open now and I have reached my 2 year limit so will not be running again, if you’re interested in any of our amazing officer roles specifically contact our student voice team and I am more than happy to share more of what it is like to be Vice Present Education! vpeducation@ljmu.ac.uk