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Representation: what are you talking about?

Student opinion really matters to us.We call it the Student Voice and is the most important tool we have when trying to make things better for students at UCA. Without it, we could be focusing our efforts in the wrong place, so we regularly run surveys and talk to students to make sure we know exactly what's going on and what needs to be improved.

'Representation' can sound quite dull, but it's actually just the term we use to refer to doing what's best for students.

The Students' Union isn't exclusive, it's totally inclusive and we offer lots of different ways for you to get involved however you want. We run fully democratic elections every year to make sure we're working in the interest of the greatest number of students.

By being a Course Rep, you can use your experience of studying on your course to make changes that could affect all your coursemates. We need two Reps from every year of every course at every campus to tell us how things can be made better. It doesn't take much of your time and you get to make a difference.

If you want to have a say over how things are being done over your whole campus, you should run for election to Student Council. There is a Council on each campus made up of 13 elected members representing a broad range of different 'groups' and opinions from the student body. Meeting roughly every month, you'll get to help decide how the Students' Union does things.

If you're really serious about improving the experience of students at UCA, consider being a Campus Officer. Every year students from each campus elect somebody to represent their needs and views to the very highest level of the University. Campus Officers areon sabbatical, which means they have either taken a break between studies or have just graduated and want to 'give something back' before starting their career and are paid £16,500 per year to cover living costs. Campus Officers make the big day-to-day decisions about how the Students' Union can improve its repsentation of students.

Perhaps you want to go even bigger, and have a say about how the Students' Union is run as an entire organisation! Our highest level of representation is the Trustee Board, which makes sure the Union doesn't run into any kind of strategic, financial or legal difficulty. The Trustee Board is made up of the five Campus Officers, two External Trustees and five Students. This means you can be part of something big and leave university with something really impressive on your CV!

We're all about listening and doing, so tell us how things can be better. We'll represent your views in the right places to get things done.