With nominations for next year’s FXU Presidents underway, I spoke to current President of Student Experience Amanda Chetwynd-Cowieson, former Falmouth Photography student about her experiences and what advice she would give to anyone considering nominating themselves for any of the elected roles.
1. So this time last year you were considering running for President, what drew you to the role of President of Student Experience?
I was pretty set on taking on one of the President roles from the moment I started First year at Falmouth. FXU is so important to student life I was just really keen to be involved! The main decision for me was which of the roles to go for. I got involved in loads of different activities whilst studying (sports, societies, RAD, volunteering, student rep to name a few!) so I saw something attractive about all of the roles. I went for student experience in the end as it has, in my view, the broadest job remit and covered some aspects of student life I found most interesting. I like having multiple things to think about so it was kind of perfect really. As a person with lots of hobbies helping students get involved is something I just love doing and it’s been really rewarding this year!
2. What does your role as President of Student Experience involve?
The underlying aspect of all the President roles is to represent the student’s best interests at the most senior levels. My role works with Falmouth Uni, Exeter Uni and FX Plus (their joint service provider). On a day-to-day level there’s a ton of meetings with senior University staff, individual students, clubs and societies. This means I’m involved in a huge variety of discussions, so it really is a case of every hour of every day being totally different. One moment I can be on a tour of the new sports centre site and the next I’m discussing the price of car parking, then I might be putting across the student’s views of accommodation followed by helping a society apply for extra funding!
3. Do you have any quick words of advice or encouragement for students thinking of nominating themselves?
Come and talk to the Presidents!!!! We really are here to advise people who may be interested in our roles and we want as many people as possible to run for them in the elections! Seeing as we spend a lot of time together we can talk a fair bit about each other’s jobs as well so just pop into any of the offices, Woodlane or Tremough.
4. What have been the highs of the experience? What was your proudest moment or achievement?
I’ve been pretty lucky in this job to say the least and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to choose just one! I’ve played rugby with Sarah Hunter (the England women’s captain), helped students successfully apply for over £5000 worth of funding, worked on several really cool campaigns with students and had the opportunity to represent FXU students on a national level with BUCS (British Universities and Colleges Sport) and NUS (National Union of Students). Oh and had lunch with Dawn French, that was pretty cool! Actually, there have been so many cool moments it’s hard to even remember them all! I feel like my proudest moment will be next week actually, we’ve been working with students on the campaign ‘Don’t DisAbility’ and I’ve been heading up the ‘Sport For All’ day. There’s so much going on and so many students involved I’m actually painfully excited. We even have Fred Bridges, a cricketer on the world cup winning England Physical Disability team, coming to campus! I suppose something else I’m quite proud of is that I’ve nearly completed my manifesto I was voted in on, that’s really satisfying!
5. What was particularly challenging about the role? What will you miss most?
The challenging part is how much of the role is confidential. I guess a down side of being the student voice at this senior level is that there are some parts we just can’t talk about. I’m going to miss working with the FXU team so much! We’re actually so lucky with our Student Union staff down here, I appreciated them before, but now I have an insight into how hard they work and it’s just amazing! I’m also going to miss the other Presidents, we get on scarily well considering we’ve only worked together since August and we’re a really strong team now. It’s incredibly reassuring being part of a group that work so well together.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Amanda, and I wish you all the best with your manifesto!
If you want to find out more about the 2016 elections you can check out the FXU web page. Falmouth Anchor also created a helpful guide to the elections with a short film, which is well worth a watch: http://goo.gl/ZnOj7x