Alice Finnegan.

Candidate for VP Wellbeing & Diversity

The recent year has shown the strains that our student body have been placed under, and has highlighted where the weaknesses in our support networks lie. The university have encouraged the students to actively engage with the welfare team, but welfare does not start here. The welfare and mental health could be much improved if we started at the source of a lot of the student body’s stresses, academia. The impact on academic learning this year has been immense, and it has had an impact on the welfare of students. What I would like to do is mitigate this impact by improving the practices in place at the level of academia.

Admin teams are overworked and understaffed, which has a negative impact on them being able to respond to the students who are reaching out to them. Meanwhile the careers and wellbeing teams have slots booked up for weeks, leaving students with no way to seek support. With everything online, departments are trying hard to create a sense of academic communities, to make students feel like they have a place to turn to.

We have student representatives feeding us these problems, and we can find a way to solve them. My plans for the next year include bridging this gap between students and the academic staff, by utilising the feedback given student representatives. They are students, and so easy to talk to, and willing to listen and act on any issue’s students are having.

Further, we need more representation within these communities, the intake of students to Royal Holloway is becoming more diverse every year, and there needs to be representation of this diversity, whether that be in BAME representatives, LGBTQ+, or the disabled students collective. Royal Holloway must provide a safe and beneficial learning, and social environment for all students. This cannot just be a tokenistic representation, instead it needs to be a fully integrated role that becomes embedded in the academic structure. A way in which I plan to do this is to have a diverse range of student representatives, so that any student feels like they have someone to which they can turn to, and relate to. The curriculum also needs updating, old white men are out, lets introduce a diversified curriculum which reflects the type of community that we have.