Welcome back to another monthly update from your President Team! October seems to have absolutely flown by and somehow we are nearly at Halloween already! We hope everyone has been settling into the new year well and enjoying all the SU, University and City has to offer (in between sheltering from the storms!)

What Have We Been Up To?

We kicked this month off with the faculty mixers in the SU, with one hosted by each president for our respective faculties. It was great to see you chatting to each other and we were delighted to welcome some of the staff into the Students' Union. We hope everyone who attended had a good time and we are starting to plan a second round of mixers in January so keep an eye out for those!

Emily did a fantastic job organising the Wellbeing Fair on the 6th in the Den. We had several different organisations come in including Trevi and the Zone and we had loads of responses to our question board around the wellbeing resources at the university. We hope everyone who was drawn in the raffle enjoy their prizes!

We joined forces with the Faculty EDI teams to host a menopause awareness event in the Den this month. It was a very successful event with a talk from the CEO of Devon Mind, Olivia Craig, that was attended by staff and students alike. We loved working with the EDI team and are looking forward to more collaborations in future!

Emily has continued her work towards making sure period products are available to all and has started looking into the provisions at other universities and whether a national campaign to promote free period products for universities is something we can start. We are leading by example by trying to find a sustainable source of period products that we can provide in the SU toilets for anyone that needs them.

Submit Your Period Product Provision Feedback Here

Who Have We Been Talking To?

It's been a busy month for meetings now that everyone is back! The whole Presidents' Team attended the University Teaching and Learning Quality committee and heard about the changes to Discovery Week and got reassurance on the Universities stand on Turnitin's changes to their terms of service. 

Poppy and Emily held their first faculty forums with the new course reps where they were able to talk about what the reps' roles are, introduce the school reps and begin gathering feedback from their respective faculty. Poppy was then able to take this feedback to her Faculty Teaching and Learning Quality Committee where staff where very engaged and keen to hear students' views. More importantly, the staff were keen to respond to the feedback which is excellent to see.

The UPSU Board of Trustees met at the end of the month which allowed all the team to switch into their trustee hats and talk strategy around the SU. This was the first time the board has met since the team officially became trustees and as part of the pre meeting lunch each President was able to stand up with their representative hat on and share their priorities for the year. This gave the rest of the board a chance to get to know us and it started some great conversations around the role of an SU in higher education.

Senate, who provide strategic oversight of the University's activities in relation to teaching, learning and assessment; research; and any other academic matters impacting on the student experience and assurance to the Board of Governors, met this week as well. All three presidents are a part of Senate where we provide a report on UPSU's activities and contribute to discussions. Vriti wrote and presented an excellent paper, and Emily made a strong point around how transparency and basic communication with students from the University and staff would improve the student experience.

Poppy has joined a new university workstream around assessment and employability and has been able to provide an insight into what works from a student perspective particularly around feedback on assessments.

What Events Are Coming Up?

It's Halloween weekend! We have two great nightclub events on Friday (30th) and Saturday (31st) but that's not all; there's limited edition drinks available at the Lounge and the bar and a Halloween offer on membership at the SU Gym!

We have our first Cafe and Chat today in the Lounge, Poppy will be in there from 1 till 2pm, so come along to meet your President of Science and Engineering, ask any questions or just catch up about everything the team have been up to!

Vriti is currently busy planning International Students Day on the 17th November so keep an eye out for more information on how you can get involved!