Why am I running for Education Officer? Because it was uncontested? Because I\u2019d been spending a lot of time in the union and noticed all the STAND flyers? Because I care? Truth be told, it\u2019s all of these. I\u2019ve found myself in my 3rd and final year of university and realised I\u2019m just not quite ready to leave. I have also been much more involved this year, I started up the Neuroscience society which went pretty well and I found something of a passion in representing others. I give all projects my full attention, which initially was a learning curve with organisation, but I\u2019ve got that down to a tee now. A lot of my best decisions have been spontaneous ones, and this is one that I believe will be top of that list. In my second year I had no intention of standing for student rep. I\u2019m a fairly shy person and used to absolutely despise talking to a group of people, but somehow my legs decided that, last minute, I would stand and in front of 30 odd people and mumble a few words about how I\u2019d be the best person for them to tackle problems in the Faculty of Life Sciences. Embarrassingly, I went the most beetroot shade of red imaginable. But it turns out I was pretty good at it. Since then I\u2019ve gone on to be a PASS leader, a student rep, a chair of a society, one of those people that stands up in lectures and shouts at you. Lecture shout-outs are a strange one and never as terrifying as you think they\u2019re going to be, which is good as I\u2019ll be in your lectures no doubt – watch out for me – I\u2019ll be the ginger girl in the big glasses asking you nicely to vote for me. These are the kind of qualities which basically mean I\u2019ve got the stones to approach the university and stand for change.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s a little about me, what about my policies I hear you cry. Well, I\u2019m standing for many of the same things that other Education Officer candidates are; the difference is how I\u2019m going to achieve them. I know that I, and many of my friends, have been annoyed (to put it politely) at how long feedback can take. According to the university feedback for coursework, e-learning work, essays, and anything aside from exams, should take a MAXIUMUM of 15 working days. Note \u201cworking days\u201d and how often they get away with bank holidays, university holidays, etc. In my opinion, and pretty much every predecessors opinion that\u2019s just too long and it\u2019s often over that. So how do we change that? Well, it\u2019s pretty simple really \u2013 we put a system onto my.manchester where you personally can complain that feedback is taking too long, isn\u2019t good enough or just hasn\u2019t happened \u2013 at all. From there the complaints go to heads of faculties and they give official warnings to teaching staff \u2013 or even better fines. Staff would definitely stick to deadlines if they were fined a tenner for each student whose work was returned late. Of course fining staff is probably a little optimistic but dealing with the complaints is definitely doable. Along with the feedback system I\u2019d like to implement a \u201ccorrespondence\u201d complaints system \u2013 which will work in a similar way. I.e. if you haven\u2019t heard back from your dissertation\/project supervisor for 3 weeks you\u2019ll be able to complain about it and get it sorted. Another of my policies, and I\u2019m going out on a limb here, is to do with mental health awareness as a disability (in the universities eyes). Not everyone will agree with me here, but you are entitled to the same allowances for mental health problems as you would be for dyslexia or a physical disability. This is a personal policy for me and I\u2019m sure Cat will be delighted that I\u2019m trying to do my little bit to reduce stigma so here it goes. I suffered from depression and an eating disorder during my time at Uni, and it nearly destroyed me. It certainly affected my work but I didn\u2019t have any idea about the Universities policy on mental health because it wasn\u2019t advertised \u2013 anywhere. I will say though, the counselling service is brilliant and if you are suffering go see them, they have time for everyone.
\nSome other things I\u2019ll be working towards include; redesign of group space in Alan Gilbert LC, more e-learning, more podcasting, improvements in AV equipment in lecture theatres (specifically Leamington Theatre anyone?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Megan Gurney tells us why we should vote for her for Education Officer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[3544,5500,2122,5501],"coauthors":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9141"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9141"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}