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.
November's Rep of the Month is Faisal Ali, Faculty Rep for Postgraduate Taught students in the Institute of Education, who has been actively engaging with his role. He's been pursuing subtitles on UCL videos and promoting mental health services for students!
You can see what else he has been working on below.
"Coming from the PGCE programme the misconception of us being part time students is often portrayed and it was important for us to achieve the Faculty Rep position, and every issue and idea is taken seriously. Speaking with facility and service managers at the events have been extremely useful and are very happy to communicate and help through emails. Currently I have focused on having subtitles applied to videos that are used within our courses to help hearing impaired students, volume issues or even language barriers. Every person who I have spoken to is on board and very supportive, with the policy ratified through the Student Union and the resources available, I believe this is something that can become permanent and central in UCL soon which would be amazing. Also now acquiring every service available for Mental Health and Well-being, I am fully equipped to deliver this information to all the other programme reps and talk about having 5 minutes in our seminars to let all students know what services are available to help us. I have acquired a list of all the programme reps within my faculty and will be arranging a meeting very soon to discuss how to get this information out to as many students as possible. I am at placement so I teach at school for five weeks at a time, but coming to University after school in the evening now and then for a meeting is a nice refresher from all the course work. What an experience, and I am loving every minute of it."