QMSU Visit

Hello lovely ULIPpers,

Today I am here with a blog post to tell you about my reading week visit to QMSU!
First of all, if you didn’t know, Queen Mary University of London, and ULIP are in partnership; and so we aim to extend this partnership between the Unions too. As well as this, the LLM students are represented by QMSU, so they will be (hopefully) visiting ULIP to see how they can better represent those students, and how we can strengthen our partnership and work together effectively.

My day at QM began with a tour of their campus with the Executive Committee who are sabbatical officers and work full-time, (they showed me a lovely view over London from the school of Business and Management). I then met with the Student engagement team who do a lot of work from working with societies as well as employability and volunteering. I met with the Students’ Union CEO who was interested in ULIPSU and the work that we do on this side of the pond. They have a Representation and Democracy Manager at the SU who I met to discuss an array of things such as researching SU changes, support for their executive committee and the yearly NSS survey. I ended the day with their Secretary and Government advisor who knows a lot about the complaints procedures and their constitution.

Whilst QMSU is significantly bigger, we have a lot of things in common too, such our how  hard we work, the love for what we do, and the sexiness of our exec committees ;).

But we also have our differences, QMSU has an Education officer, currently Redwan Shahid, this is something that at ULIPSU we don’t have. In the statistics from the NSS, only 67% of you feel that ‘the Students’ Union (association or guild) effectively represents students’ academic interests’. So this year, I will be looking to introduce the role of an Education officer in the ULIPSU constitution in time for the SU next year. The education officer’s main roles will be working with SpLD, assessment and marking, the NSS survey and careers support post ULIP for BA3s. The education officer will sit on the Executive Committee as well as the Student Council to better liaise with your academic needs.

With over 60% of their students being from BME backgrounds, they do some super interesting things at QMSU, for example they are currently holding an Islamophobia Awareness Month and later in the year they will be holding a British Asian Heritage month.

I hope to see them all again soon and liaise with the work that QMSU engage in this year,

Bisous,
Kameni, your Union President 18-19