With all of my campaigns, I like to make the most of the amazing media channels we have here at RSU. Fresh Air and Fresh Radio are run by two incredibly talented interns who I work with on most days, and I also regularly write for Fresh Magazine. Most recently I worked on our General Election video for which Mark (our Fresh Air intern) provided the voiceover, and Jonas (our FreshTV Intern) spent a lot of time and patience editing. I would like to say that I could make a pretty good TV producer but based on the amount of times Jonas rolled his eyes at me or looked like he was going to have a meltdown I will remain quiet on that one.

Sometimes my days can be a bit hectic, so I really like to try and pop down to The Hive Café – our SU run, on-campus home to Growhampton (a project funded by the NUS Students’ Green Fund). They make a seriously good hot chocolate, and the award-winning apple tarts are extremely delicious. I always try to schedule meetings in here to really show off what a great space it is (not because I am biased).

Okay, it’s not the most exciting of my tasks but I do have to try and put time aside every day to check and respond to my emails. In a day I can get anything from 10 to 100 emails. Mostly they are from staff at the university with whom I am liaising on particular projects or committees, or with the external charities and companies I work with on campaigns, but often I also receive emails from students wanting to get involved in particular campaigns or run their own.  Being efficient and effective in my communication is key and it is a skill that I have developed over the last six months.

I meet with all kinds of people from all kinds of places to talk about the campaigns we are running. Here, Matt Wall (our GM) and I am meeting with Lesley and Neil from Wandsworth Council in The Hive about our General Election campaign which they are keen to get involved with in order to get more young people engaged in politics and registering to vote. One of the most important things is that a campaign reaches as many people as possible and so having people coming onto campus from external companies or charities can really help us to get more students involved and engaged.

It isn’t just via email that I communicate with students; I regularly meet up with students to talk about their ideas or passions and think about ways that we can implement them. I mainly liaise with our part-time elected officers who are there to represent our students in different areas, but I also spend a lot of my time chatting to students who want to get involved in RAG and do some fundraising for various charities. Talking to students and getting them involved in everything I do/getting involved in things that they are doing is really important to me as I want to make sure that I am representing and working on the things that students really care about.

I love a bit of social media and so often spend a percentage of my day checking through our Twitter and Facebook, replying to messages or tweets and sharing what we are getting up to with our students. We also have an Instagram which I run, I try and put up one picture every other day but I am also a bit of a perfectionist with it so if I don’t like the photo enough, it doesn’t make the cut. We also tried Snapchat for a while but some of our replies were somewhat questionable so we logged out of that one for a while.

Myself and the other sabbs take it in turns to duty manage at our weekly events, Fez and Bop. Duty managing basically means you are there as a representative and friendly face (hopefully) from the students’ union to keep an eye out for students’ welfare and safety. Having someone at all of our events that our students recognise means that they always know there is someone there to help them out if they need it. It is also great for us sabbs because it gives us an opportunity to see as many students as possible, and to appreciate how great our nights out really are.