By Daniel Steinbeck
Hello. As the new CSU Student Senate President I’m here to keep you informed of what we do, who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish. To keep you in the loop we’ll be providing regular updates from our meetings so the student body has the latest on the Student Senate activities.
For those who don’t know, The Student Senate is a combination of two representatives from each student council on each campus, including the online student cohort. Representatives are voted into positions by their respective Student Representative Councils. The Student Senate meets once every three months and discusses issues raised by the SRC’s that can’t be dealt with at a local level.
In the recent Student Senate meeting, on 19 July, we spoke about a number of topics. Mostly we deal with administrative stuff like acknowledging the accuracy of the minutes from the previous meetings, reports from other university bodies, approving nominations of students on to academic boards.
This meeting was a little more exciting. We raised few issues that we felt might be important to the student body. Firstly, we discussed the timetabling system and how we can work to improve it for students making it a more user friendly and personalised experience. This lead to the development of the timetabling governance committee that is working on making the timetable more reliable, user friendly and personalised for each student. We will keep you informed of the progress of this committee, currently it has only begun to note areas that need change and establish the goals. Meetings are held monthly so as to get as much done as quickly as possible so we can roll this out to students asap.
Secondly, we spoke about developing a Standards document that will outline what facilities, recreational facilities, safe spaces and social rooms that students can expect from CSU on every campus. This is still in its early stages of development and we are looking to students for ideas on what they feel is necessary and should be standard across all campuses.
Watch this space – the team will continue to give you updates and if you have any ideas or comments please get in touch with your SRC’s or email the Student Senate directly.
