Ananya Krishna.

Candidate for School of Humanities

My main goal as school rep would be to improve all student’s experience by getting more support for your degree and broadening your horizons through:

1. Creating more opportunities for you to transform your degree from work to passion - University is much more than simply absorbing information, writing essays and completely exams. This stressful outlook could be remedied by creating more opportunities and spaces where you can explore your degree without the pressure of performing well. These opportunities will allow you to change your outlook on your studies and revive the passion that made you choose your degree. Such opportunities would take form in department-based societies or reading groups, run by students and/or lecturers, also allowing you to expand your knowledge and engage more with your lecturers and peers.
2. Accessibility of representatives - Students aren’t familiar enough with their representatives and therefore don’t know how to effectively voice their concerns and issues to the department. I aim to organise bi-weekly meetings with department and academic reps outside of SSC meetings to maintain a constant flow of feedback from you to your student voice team. As well as this, to establish a better relationship with humanities students, I’d be available online for an hour once a week (similar to office hours) so you can raise concerns to me directly.
3. Intra department exchange - Students shouldn’t feel restricted to their degree. Advertising the idea of auditing classes or casually dropping in on lectures, for example, would give you more chances to study beyond your course. The societies and reading groups which I am proposing, would be open to all humanities students for this reason as well. Within the SU itself, I plan to work with societies collectively to organise events where you have the chance to interact with other humanities students in a context outside of studies, also strengthening the bonds between the humanities departments.
4. Study supports from departments - Most students aren’t aware of the study supports currently set up by the humanities department. To increase engagement, I plan to use the departments’ academic support Moodle pages, specifically the announcements feature, to notify students of any upcoming events. As well, to minimise emails, I plan to condense information gathered throughout the week on student opportunities and academic supports into a newsletter sent out by the school of Humanities.