Union announces new Officer Trustees for 2023/24

As the sun set on the penultimate Friday of Spring Term, five students were announced as the new Officer Trustees of Imperial College Union for the 2023/24 academic year. This week, Felix takes a look at each of their campaigns.

The Officer Trustees are elected representatives of the student body, who take a year out of their studies to lead Imperial College Union. All the roles are full-time, paid positions. There are five Officer Trustee positions: four Deputy Presidents, responsible for specific aspects of the student experience, and one Union President. The President is ultimately responsible for the Union, and also sits on College Council, meeting regularly with senior Imperial staff and acting as the voice of the student body.

Camille Boutrolle will head up the team of Officer Trustees (OTs) as Union President for 2023/24. Boutrolle won a landslide victory which saw her claim just over half of all first-choice votes – double her closest rival – clinching her a win after just one round of voting.

Alongside her as next year’s Officer Trustees are:

• Stephanie Yeung, Deputy President (Finance & Services)
• Christian Cooper, Deputy President (Clubs & Societies)
• Andreea Cojocea, Deputy President (Welfare)
• Yi Yang, Deputy President (Education)

Camille Boutrolle

Imperial College Union President

Boutrolle’s campaign centred on pledges to reform and work with the College for a more inclusive student experience. She promised to push for on-campus food options for all dietary requirements and ‘readily available’ microwaves, lecture theatre plugs and water fountains across all of Imperial’s campuses. Alongside this, she said she would lobby the College for full disclosure of its investments, and advocate for it to reduce its portfolio carbon intensity. 

Boutrolle has also proposed a novel cross-registration scheme with the London School of Economics, modelled after an existing partnership between MIT and Harvard. The Harvard-MIT scheme lets students at one institution register for modules at the other, for credit, at no extra cost.

Stephanie Yeung

Deputy President (Finance & Services)

Stephanie Yeung secured the biggest victory of the OTs, winning four times as many first-choice votes as her nearest (and only) competitor. Yeung told voters she would lobby the College ‘to allocate resources to further sustainability efforts’. She paired this with pledges to improve the Union, promising to make Union venues safer and to work with student groups, and clubs, societies and projects (CSPs) to deliver more inclusive events. Yeung hopes this will encourage more students to come to the Union and hold their events at its venues, providing a boost to revenue. She intends to use this additional income to ‘bring back student-friendly prices’ at the Union’s bars.

Christian Cooper

Deputy President (Clubs & Societies)

Christian Cooper won 47% of first-choice votes, with a campaign centred on improving transparency and reducing barriers to CSP participation. Cooper said he would ‘establish a platform for students to openly field questions to ICU staff’. At a Union hustings event last week, he elaborated on this proposal; the platform would take the form of a discussion board, where students can ask CSP-related questions to Union staff publicly.

Cooper sees financial, social and CSP-culture-related problems as the three biggest barriers to student participation. At hustings, he said he would tackle the first by seeking additional funding from the Imperial College itself. He intends to work with the Deputy President (Welfare) on reducing social and cultural barriers, by first holding student focus groups to see what the biggest complaints are.

Yi Yang

Deputy President (Clubs & Societies)

Yi Yang pulled off the biggest upset of this election cycle, narrowly beating the incumbent Deputy President (Education), Jason Zheng, who was seeking to secure a second term in the role. She pledged to review undergraduate and postgraduate syllabuses ‘to ensure that state-of-the-art material is being taught’ at the university, and to ‘launch campaigns to standardise UROP [Imperial’s undergraduate research placement programme] applications’.  

Her campaign sought to woo Imperial’s international and postgraduate contingents. In her manifesto, Yang said she would ‘keep campaigning against tuition fee increase’. Undergraduate fees for home students are currently capped by the UK Government at £9,250. Overseas and postgraduate student fees, however, are set by the College, and were increased by 6.5% this year, in line with the annual rise in average RPI.

Andreea Cojocea

Deputy President (Clubs & Societies)

Andrea Cojocea secured 61% of first-choice votes, beating her sole competitor to the position of Deputy President (Welfare). Cojocea’s campaign pledges spanned a whole range of welfare-related topics: she promised to ‘alleviate the distress caused by the cost-of-living crisis’, tackle the ‘insufficient support and visibility regarding sexual misconduct’, improve the accessibility of welfare support, and partner with CSPs and students to foster a sense of belonging and community.