Emily's 1st Blog

I sat down to write my blog and have found that its harder than I thought! Where to start! Well I’m Emily and I’m Vice President Development at Reading University Students Union. How did I get here! Two years ago I started my degree in engineering, but also met some amazing people and signed up to Nightline.

In my Freshers term aside from everything else that happens as a fresher, I trained as a nightliner and then in the spring term of my second year with lots of arm twisting I signed up to be co training co-ordinator for nightline and Vice chair of Student council. With my training I got sent on the National Student Learner Programme (NSLP) with NUS. This was an amazing three day course where I learnt how to be a student trainer! I came back from Liverpool all enthusiastic and with my co-trainer Rachel we re-wrote the Nightline training plan and I also got involved in RUSU training. From there my involvement spiralled and I became Chair of Student council when PDT resigned and lead student council through the governance review to bring the exciting new structures we have now!

Then when the time came for nominations to elections, I didn’t really have any choice I had been closely involved in RUSU for a year, I knew that I’d work well with the team that were re-running and I had lots of exciting plans for the future which I’ll talk about later. So after a stressful few weeks and 28 hours in the snow talking to people I was elected as VP Development. It seems such a long time ago now! But since I was elected I have had to chair the last ever student council, handover my nightline training (Gemma Chris and Nat I’m sure you’ll do an excellent job!!), There was a small matter of exams and then I started!

I can’t believe 6 weeks have gone by since I started my handover with nick! Everyone says the summer will fly by and it’s true this is almost my last full week in the office before Freshers week!! I have been on sabbatical training with the rest of the sabbs and the student trustees, I have been on activities in action, NUS training about my role, I have written my plans for the year, written the training plans for the year, ordered publicity for Spark and Nightline, interviewed external trustees and lots of other stuff.
I think that’s probably enough for now! But I’ll blog later this week on my plans for the year!