President Jack O'Neill and VP Sport Dom Brown led sessions at the recent RH100 panel, as students discussed how the services should look in the future.
The second RH100 panel of the year saw two incredibly exciting topics being discussed by students who provided feedback and new ideas about how services can look in the future. Myself and VP Sport Dom Brown helped lead the sessions as we seek to gain more information in contributing to our work!
Careers
Throughout this year, I have been working on a Policy Inquiry into the Careers Support at Royal Holloway – this has involved external research, internal research, and student consultation. There is a real appetite for change regarding the careers support provision at Royal Holloway and I have been in close communication with the new Director of Careers & Employability to see where the service can be headed.
In the session, groups of students observed and considered careers services from other institutions, ones that run a very different style of service. It was amazing to hear how students developed their own ‘pick and mix’ style service, highlighting the aspects of each service that they felt was beneficial to them. It is abundantly clear that careers services face the challenge of providing an increasingly tailored service to students, but there is no reason why there aren’t solutions around this to improve the support for students!
Active campus
I have been working closely with Active Lifestyle & Sport this year to produce a plan for the future of Royal Holloway in terms of creating an active campus. This plan has been put together as a result of benchmarking against other universities and consultation with staff and student representatives. This plan will hopefully shape future investment into a fitness and wellbeing project including a new facility build.
RH100 was a fantastic place for us to announce these exciting plans for a new facility, as well as announcing the fact that within 12 months students will be able to pay for the gym monthly through direct debit. After providing some context around the topic and announcing these plans, the students were then split into groups and provided with a fun but complex task to complete. The task included deciding on what group of stakeholders should be prioritised in the future out of staff, student groups, student participation, community, and gym users.
It was fascinating to see the thought process and rationale exhibited within the groups and I believe we have gained some important feedback. To finish, the students completed a menti survey to show their thoughts on pricing structures and ideas for the new facility.
All of this feedback is vital in progressing this project along and the information, when deciphered, will be delivered back to the Active Programme Board who are in charge of developing this project. We really appreciate all of the insight from students and it was a fantastic opportunity to show everyone what has been worked on behind the scenes!
Jack O'Neill // President
Dom Brown // Vice President Sport