As your Union, one of our most important jobs is representing your academic interests and making sure you can influence the way UCL works. The best way for us to do this is by working with Academic Reps in every UCL Department.
Each month, we’re featuring your reps and the work they’re doing to make UCL better. If you have an idea about how to make your course, your department or UCL work better, you can contact your own Academic Rep using our Find Your Rep page.
April’s Reps of the Month are Mary Ann Jiang, Sanya Raipal & Maria Kairuz Correa, Postgraduate (taught) Student Representatives in International Development, who were able to organise student-led seminars and who have proposed changes to tutoring within their department to better help students!
You can see what else they have been working on below.
"As education and International Development Student Reps, with Mary Ann Jiang and Sanya Rajpal we have been working on:
- Introducing Seminars conducted by students: to share the different legislations and educational systems around the world. Module leader has supported us in this matter and its awesome to have this experience to share since we are 132 students from around 80 nationalities.
- Longer and more frequent appointments at the Academic Writing Centre: We have raised the issue in 3 SCC meetings and formally addressed a letter to the Director of the Centre (Find It attached). The problem is now under study and the budget will be revised in order to improve the service.
- Better maintenance of IoE bathrooms: We have raised the issue of poor conditions on the IoE bathrooms (lack of toilet paper, dirtiness bad smell) especially at the Library. We were informed an outsourced company cleans bathrooms and not UCL staff, so we are campaigning towards more shifts (this requires more budget as well).
- Homogenized tutoring: We received students complainants regarding the assigned tutors for the essays. We have shared this with module leaders who were not aware of the lack of attention from some of the tutors. We proposed (i) a “standard format” of what is asked from the tutor and the student to avoid misunderstandings and (ii) the option to give feedback about the tutor.
- Specific module concerns: we received some feedback relating specifically to the CTI online module and coordinated with students to anonymously convey these concerns to the module coordinator."