Get Involved!

I’m sure you’ve heard this enough by now but, welcome! This is a difficult university to get into, and you’ve done tremendously well getting this far.

There are many benefits to studying at Imperial: it’s a rich, prestigious London university with a strong research culture and some of the world’s leading academics. Some of the educational provisions, such as the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) and the Horizons Programme, are either completely absent or far weaker elsewhere.

Unfortunately, there are also plenty of issues at our university. Our student satisfaction is among the lowest in the country, while our counselling service is so severely underfunded that some students have had to wait over 15 weeks before they can be seen. Other student services, including the cooked breakfast in the Senior Common Room and the swimming pool at St Mary’s hospital, have been cut, while the membership cost at Ethos Gym has been hiked up. At the same time, Imperial runs a huge surplus, exceeding £78m every year for the past five.

I don’t say any of this to demoralise you, but rather to make a point: we can do something about this. Very often, we feel powerless when faced with issues, whether within our departments or across the university. You probably noticed problems at your school or college that you had no power to improve, but university is different. Students can be, and should be, more than passengers in their own education.

There are so many ways you can get involved beyond your studies. You can join a club and help foster a sense of community. You can work with your department’s society and get involved with activities and events outside your course. You can also run for election as a rep (nominations open September 29th) and represent your fellow students on the issues that matter to you most. The last of these can often seem daunting and pointless, but they can result in real, tangible changes for students. As an academic rep, I was able to introduce undergraduate teaching assistants to lab and computing sessions in my department, in addition to the existing postgraduate demonstrators. This means fourth year students now have the chance to earn over £14/hour and freshers have more support. That year we also pushed the university into ending its zero-tolerance policy on late coursework, wherein work submitted even a minute late would result in a student losing all the marks for that assignment. Rather more excitingly, a rep in Physics was recently able to organise a Pizza Vending machine for students, which should be arriving on campus soon. Students also made a huge difference during the nationwide pensions dispute earlier this year, where our support for academic and support staff helped strengthen their action, and eventually helped force Imperial’s management to compromise.

These kinds of achievements might seem out of reach – that they’re too ambitious or require some special knowledge or ability, but they don’t. All that’s needed is the belief that things can change, and the motivation to see it through.

This year we – myself and likeminded people in the Union – will be fighting back on the cynical cuts to student services discussed previously. We will also be working on improving student space, with a particular focus on those departments (such as Life Sciences) which currently do not have common rooms. In addition, we’d like to see wide-reaching academic decisions that affect all of us being made more by students and academic staff, and less by senior management. Finally (for now), in line with other London universities, we will also be pushing the student union to start paying its bar staff the London Living Wage.

These are my priorities, but they needn’t be yours. Whatever you want to do at Imperial, you owe it to yourself to be more than just a passenger. Whether there are issues in how we’re being taught, in events that are being run, or just in the vending machines, rather than thinking “this sucks! I wish things were better,” I believe our refrain should be “what can we do to change this?” We have the power to make Imperial a better place; if we truly want to, we can work together to make it happen.