► Activities Officer

Activities Officer  2011-12

This University has more to offer you than just a degree, that’s why I’m here to help you get involved in anything you want to! My role as your Activities Officer is to organise lots of the events that your Union puts on, the Graduation Ball, NCL+ awards, RAG week and Homemade Jam, just to mention a few. Most importantly my role is to help all of the 150 societies at Newcastle run smoothly and give them any advice they need. With the upcoming redevelopment of the Union building this is a huge challenge, but I can’t wait to get into it. If you don’t see anything you are interested in on our societies list, you can start your own. All you need is a bit of passion to get something off the ground. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email or a phone call. Come in and have a chat, I’ll be in the Activities Centre every lunch time. If you see me on campus this year, please stop me and say hi! I’d love to meet as many of you as possible this year. 

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Latest News and Activities:

NUS Student Unions’ Conference 2011
Leeds

Activities Officer Report

Widening Participation
- This particular workshop focussed on the participation of students in Higher Education institutions. There was a lot of concentration on the retention of students as opposed to outreaching to students.
- What can the Students Union do to help retain students?
- A student movement to widening participation. Such as student ambassadors with possibly the help of SU involvement
- Working with the University to build a coherent process such as university shadowing or primary school volunteers.

Student Engagement Toolkit
- An online resource to be able to be used to collaborate with institutions.
- The focus is on ‘hard to reach’ students such as post-grad, part time, distance and work based learners.
- Its three main tools are a card sort exercise, self reflection and a course rep bench marking tool.
- An interesting task to do with academics and students in order to gather information from varying opinions.

How to enhance student employability
- Bath have an employability strategy. To raise awareness of employability skills gained via schemes and activities delivered or supported by the SU.
- Birmingham have a monitoring Jobshop. To link to the University employability strategy, assess success of the service, spot trends and demonstrate value and impact and to secure.
- Leeds have a Jobshop which is a free service to Leeds students.
- Some ways to make it easier for students to grow their skills and know them too: a checklist next to what they have done, making it visable to others what they have done within clubs and societies.
- The need to reach out to international students who may not understand the basics of application forms.
- The idea of online interview techniques.

Tapping into the Goldmine of activities
- When conducting an event, it needs to make your Union better. VALUE to the project.
- Funders Agenda eg press release, report, publicity.
- Partnership – who do you need to be credible eg community, organisations.
- Relevance to the Union: linking societies together, outreach to the community and engage with schools.
- What’s the motivation behind the project-need to know in order to sell the idea.

Groupspaces
- 5 key areas which societies and clubs need help with:
- 1. Communication – targeted email lists
- 2. Promotion – making it easier to join, inform via multiple channels
- 3. Knowledge management – ensure institutional memory, ongoing and remembered each year and maintain committee role positions.
- 4. Website maintenance – easy to update
- 5. Financial management – create budget, looking after money
- It is good because all the data belongs to the students. Accessible.
- Included is a free website and all societies can be linked to it.
- A workshop and training session is available for those who want to be able to use it – good for Society and Club training. The possibility of running a trial run with certain clubs and societies to begin with?

19th-20th July 2011
Activities Officer -Ania Kurek
Leeds NUS Conference

 

 

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