The week of the 18th July I spent mainly in the office, I met with the projects department about some work we are doing with the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship and working out how we are going to train 8 ukrainian student officers on our NSLP programme in September. Dan Chilcott has been doing some work with ESIB (European student information bureau – Europe NUS) to help develop student representation in the Ukraine, as part of this project some officers are coming over to the UK to be trained so they can go back and develop student unions and representation. It’s a very exciting project and it is great that NUS can play a part in developing student representation but it obviously comes with a few logistical issues, translating the materials and translating during training to name but a few! For more information get in touch with Dan, he’s doing a great job and is taking them on a tour of a few unions while they are over, so if you fancy getting involved email him on dan.chilcott@nus.org.uk

We also interviewed for the NE Regional Officers job and successfully recruited, we are nearing a full RO complement now so that is really good news for unions and for NUS, thank you for your patience whilst we completed the recruitment!

On Tuesday I met with the Student Radio Association with our press department about how we are going to build closer working relationships, and to see if they could be involved in our media training and our regional media conferences.

This week in HQ I also met up with our new business development officer, met with training to go over some of the summer training programmes and went to a Unite Against Fascism meeting at Congress House in London. It was a fantastic meeting, in the wake of the London bombings there was a real sense of unity in combating islamophobia and there was also some big BNP defeats in by-elections to celebrate and discuss.

I also graduated this week and wore a silly hat, it was lovely though and I caught up with all my course mates and saw my parents for the first time in ages, I will not be posting photos however!!

The week of the 26th was quite an admin week, I am still getting used to getting hundreds of emails to deal with! I know it sounds totally mundane and bureaucratic, but unfortunately sometimes that is the role of the National Secretary, but over the past few weeks I have been trying to make simple and more efficient some of our internal processes and external communications for example; the NEC agreed some motions and amendments deadlines that I wrote which not only makes it more efficient but also means greater accessibility of our meetings and I have re-written the external mailings policy to try to make it look more professional and easier to use. The main aim is to get the mailings archived online so that all officers can access it as we all know that sometimes the mailing doesn’t make it out of the presidents in tray to the other officers who need it! Wow, my job is exciting but the thing is that if we change the little things to do with communication then it’ll make the bigger things easier to change. I am currently writing a volunteering opportunities section for the website to allow more people to get involved in NUS, I’m waiting on the NEC sending me some of the opportunities in their campaigns at the minute but in addition to this there will be a democracy guide winging its way to you soon! The website development is one of my responsibilities and one of my priorities and there will be loads of exciting new things on there soon, if you have any suggestions about what you think should be on there then email me gemma.tumelty@nus.org.uk I would love to hear your suggestions. My ideas so far…policy online, NUS successes, up to date NEC minutes, year of change page, national council section, get involved page…..and lots more!

My job also involves a lot of dealing with executive questions and complaints, it takes up a lot of time believe me! Its also extremely hard to explain how much time is taken up just by being in the office, what I mean is that when you are in everyone pops in wanting 5 mins of your time, wanting you to sign stuff, to talk to you about a project, to just talk to you, to ask you your opinion, to tell you some gossip, to show you something, to moan, to bounce ideas around, to ask you to do more work, to offload, to get approval etc etc etc I do not resent this of course but its very hard to keep track of all the things you put in place or approve day to day because it’s such a whirlwind!

One of the projects I am responsible for at the moment is ensuring the campaigns launch happens, this not only involves the logistics but also ensuring that the campaigns are actually ready to launch on the 1st September.

This week Kat, myself and Joe did a psychometric test to see how we differ and where potential conflict may arise, the results were extremely interesting and I’m hoping that will mean we can bond more as a team now we know each others strength and weaknesses!

At some point this week I met with Will Page and Ruth from Steering about some text passed at conference that hasn’t been put in constitution yet, thank you to Will for going through the text with a fine tooth comb! I am also trying to arrange a meeting with Steering so we can start the motions and compositing review and trying to arrange a meeting with rules and revision committee about some additional constitution stuff.

On the Friday I went home to my parents for the weekend, went to the dentist…rubbish! But also went shopping…yay! And got some well deserved sleep before Active Political Leadership in Preston.

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