VP Communications

Sabb Elections and a sneaky trip to France

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:47:00 Z

Hi Guys,

Welcome to my latest blog post!

The main thing that I have been doing over the past few weeks is preparing for the buildup to the sabb elections for this year. The 12th of march will see the campus rife with candidates and their teams milling about telling you all about their candidates and what they want to do to help you and your life as a student. Its a great week, its amazing fun but more importantly its your chance to choose the people that you want to run your union for the next year.

As VP Communications I sit on the elections committee, we meet to discuss rules and procedures surrounding the elections but also to help promote the fact that the elections are happening soon. All the first years among you should have noticed a poster in your kitchen, over the ISB the sabbs went round all of the kitchens, just to give you a taster of whats to come :)

As you have hopefully noticed, I have continued with the fortnightly updates called 'Your Union, Your News'. I hope that this is useful to you, we are trying to use this as a way to get information across to you without spamming you constantly with emails, if you think there is a better way of us doing this then please let us know.

On the website, I am working with James (our web guy in marketing) to roll out a new navigation bar at the top of bathstudent.com. This will mean that we can free up some space on the homepage and make it easier for you to find the things that you want. We are also finally replacing the search function with google!

The Sabbs had their annual planning day on Tuesday. Each year after the SOS, thanks for filling that in BTW, the Sabbs and the senior managers of the SU sit down and discuss the results and what that means for the SU for the next 12/18 months. We have a long term plan of things that we wnat to achieve, for example the student centre, and you guys filling in the SOS really helps us out. We are currenty in discussion about how we can plan our 'weeks' better so that we dont have three things happening at once. If a week is important enough to run then it deserves our fullest attention!

If you have any questions about the sabb elections or my postion, please to get in touch!

Thats all from me now, its raining here in Paris (I am visitng my girlfriend but she is still snoring away....) so I'm gonna find something to do that doesnt involve lots of outside time.

Ben

VP Comms

ISB and Refresh Week

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:21:00 Z

Hello and welcome to the most recent edition of my blog.

I guess most of you have had wonderful week off? Ive been bombarded with facebook updates telling me how much my friends are enjoying skiiing in VT! Lucky $%^&! I've been at work, fun fun!

I am excited to announce (again) that Impact will be in full colour from now on. The team have worked hard to find a supplier that can produce the paper at a very reasonable rate and now it will be all pretty and colourful, get your issue from the various stacks around campus!

Refresh Week

I hope you are all exited about this! We have put a lot of time into planning activities that you can do during the week, the majority of which are completely free! On Monday you come and sample the different games on offer from giant jenga to live size chess, you can always take part in the cracker challenge, how fast do you think you can eat three cream crackers? The sabbs will be around all day every day in their lovely orange tshirts and florescent yellowygreen hoodies, you wont be able to miss us!

Other things going on during the week include a presentation on the plans for the new Student Centre! Come along to elements to get a taster of what the Student Centre will be like when its completed in september of THIS YEAR!!!

More information about refresh week and what is going on can be found at bathstudent.com/refresh.

Sabbatical Elections

This years sabb nominations open on the 8th of feb, if you are considering running for a sabbatical position, get in touch with a few of the sabbs to find out more about the job. If you arent considering running, why not? Get in touch with the sabbs any way to find out a bit about this great opportunity. Perhaps I am biased because I’m doing it but I wouldn’t rather be doing anything else!

Books / Reading Lists

During my quest to get your reading lists onto bathstudent.com/books to make it easier for you to find the books that you need for your course I discovered that the library doesn’t receive all the lists that it needs from your departments. I am in shock that this is the case and am now working with the University to put pressure on your departments to ensure that the books that you need are indeed available in the library to make it easier for you to study. You cant all be expected to buy all the books that your lecturers tell you about!

Ill be talking more with your academic reps to find out exactly what the situation is on each course to find out where the problems are and get them fixed!

That’s all from me for now, check your inbox every other Monday for an update on whats going on, what you can be involved in and where we are on the issues you have raised with us!

As always, my door is always open, except when its cold but then you can just open it. Come and say Hi!

Ben Cole

VP Communications

Exams, Refresh week and Sabb Elections

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:04:00 Z

Hi Guys,

It has been two months since my last blog, sounds like I'm giving confession, and I guess I sort of am. I got elected on pledges to do everything I can to get more and more of you involved and it's time that I started pushing to make that happen.

I don’t think that we sabbs have been very good and keeping in touch with you this year and starting from Refresh week that is going to change! We have been very worried about you guys getting too many emails from us and not bothering to read the important ones, but who are we do determine what is important to you and what isn't?

From the 8th of Feb, the first Monday of semester two, we are gonna send out an email every 2 weeks updating you on what’s going on and telling you what’s coming up. It’s gonna include a selection of all sorts from what SORTED courses are coming up, which home sport games are being played that week, what entertainment we have lined up and what campaigns you can get involved in. It’s also gonna have updates on issues that you have told us are problems and we will keep you as up to date as possible with the development of the Student Centre.

If you want to hear about more specific things, you can always set your preferences at http://www.bathstudent.com/your-interests/.

There are so many things that you can get involved with if you want to, but we need to get out and shout about the things that we do that you can be involved with. If there are things that you think we should be doing please come and tell us, more and more you will see us wearing our ultra hi viz jumpers.

OK that’s all the things that I need to improve and I'll do my best to keep on top of them (this includes much more regular blog posts). Now what have I been up to? ('I hear you ask'?) I have been trying hard to work around problems so that we can get your reading lists up on bathstudent.com/books and I am meeting with library staff on Friday to best discuss how we can do this.

I had a fellow sabb from Demontford come down last week to compare and contrast our media and setup and we are putting our heads together to best see how we can support student newspapers. We are working with other sabbs from other Unis to set up the Student Publication Association so that papers like or IMPACT can talk to other Unions to share best practise and compare and contrast what they do.

A lot of my time recently has been sorting things for the upcoming Sabb elections, it's a great chance for people to get involved in the largest possible way, you will have seen articles from each of the current sabbs about why you should think about it and how great it is. For those of you that don’t want to do it, it's even more important that you use your vote and get your choice of sabb elected! Everyone is allowed to vote whether you are a 1st year or a final year. Last year only a quarter of people voted we are trying to increase that this year so that we can ensure you have chosen the sabbs that you want running your union!

That’s all from me for now, I’ll have another update for you within two weeks I PROMISE! Good luck to all those of you that still have exams! Enjoy the inter-semester break this year, we have fought hard to get it back for you so use it well!

Ben

Food, Books and the Website

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:04:00 Z

Hi Guys,

Just wanted to update you on a few things that I have been doing recently, as well as organising the recent elections I have been busy developing and researching things to make them a little better for you.

Food

We are moving forward with our research into what food services you want on campus, we completed a survey to a wide range of students and are collating that information to see if our hypothesis was actually correct. If you have any comments/ideas/problems/queries/happy stories about food on campus please feel free to get in touch with me!

Books

Bathstudent.com/books is growing strongly with students buying both new and second hand books and many of you selling your books on! As this is a new service we are keen to hear your views and ideas about it, is there any other way we could make it better or easier to use?

Bathstudent.com

We are also knee deep in reorganising the navigation that you use to get to information on bathstudent.com. We are looking for students to get involved to help us work out whether or not we have got it right, if you want to get involved with helping us do this, anyone and EVERYONE is welcome, please email me using the link below.

I am also running two bathstudent training sessions this week, one at 1:15 on Tuesday and another on Thursday at 5:15, both of the sessions are in 8w 1.1.

If you have any thoughts about any of the above or have any ideas or recommendations about how you would like to receive this kind of information please feel free to email me at sucommunications@bath.ac.uk.

I am always happy to hear your feedback and points of view. Like all of the other sabbs, my door is always open.

Ben Cole

VP Communications

The First Few Weeks

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:14:00 +0100

Hi Guys,

We thought things were going to calm down after Freshers' Week but they have just got busier!

During the first week most of my time was occupied sorting out all of the academic rep elections and this year we had the highest turn out in representation we have had to date!

I have also had various meetings regarding the usability of 6WS and how students can utilise this newly available space, more to come on that in the near future.

We are delighted to announce the launch of our online book comparison site, bathstudent.com/books is now up and running and we are adding more features all the time. I am in contact with each department and are slowly getting your reading lists up there to make it easier to use!

That was a very quick whirlwind of what I have been doing, I am now off to France for the weekend because we are allowed holiday some times :)

Voting for NUS Delegates and C/S/SU reps is happening next week make sure you use your vote, we need you to pick who you want! Both elections can be found at bathstudent.com/elections/

Thats all for me now as I need to catch my train, please feel free at any time to get in touch with me (or any of the other sabbs), its imperative that we know that we are doing what you actually want us to do.

Ben Cole

VP Communications