Leadership Elections are coming up, so if you are nominating yourself to be a leader at Royal Holloway Students’ Union read this blog to see what a day in the life of VP Education looks like!
Leadership Elections are coming up, so if you are nominating yourself to be a leader at Royal Holloway Students’ Union read this blog to see what a day in the life of VP Education looks like!
The working day starts at 09:00, so I leave about 08:45 to make sure I have time to get to work and settle in. The first thing to do is always to sort through any emails from students or staff that I received overnight or the weekend. I’ll send replies as soon as possible to get these out of the way and filed away!
Once this is done, if I don’t have any immediate meetings I’ll take 10 minutes to read through the WonkHE daily briefing to check out ideas from other SU’s and any changes or notable events going on at other Unis. As a Sabb its important to do this so you can see examples of best practice across the sector and use them to convince University staff that your ideas would benefit students!
As Vice President Education you take on several roles, mainly as a student representative but also as a member of university council, a trustee member at the SU, and as member of staff at the SU. Balancing these roles can be difficult during a day as you’ll constantly have to change pace between board meetings and working groups!
Most days consist of at least one University meeting, whether that’s a working group on Personal Tutor development, Course creation, or University Education Committee. Everything you do has a significant impact on student, so days also consist of lots of reading of papers and preparing points to raise.
Any free time in the day goes to portfolio objectives – things related to the role I want to improve for students like personal tutoring or making Moodle easier to navigate – or working on Priority 8. This involves creating and following action plans, reaching out to stakeholders at the University, and reaching out to students and reps to work with them on projects and campaigns. This has involved walking around to look at new spaces on campus and in Egham, as well as running focus groups on deadline-stacking!
Of course though, every day is different and this is just an example, so if you want to talk further drop me an email at vpeducation@su.rhul.ac.uk!