Final Council and reflections (part 1)

Admit it. You're humming it now.

This is a long one.

This year I've had the thankless job of being the Chair of Student Council. Not entirely fair; I got a few thank-yous after last night's democratic marathon. However, for the most part this has been a frustrating insight into how incredibly bloody difficult it is to get students to do anything. There are 97 member of Council; last night, I saw just over 40 of them. We're all busy, but more than half of the students elected to this quite important policy-passing body couldn't bring themselves to turn up. Even though we had the shiny conference centre, with its microphones and soft lighting.

With that being said, I'm really not surprised. I did my best to run the meeting, and I'll admit I bungled the amendment that should have been attached to one of the motions. I appreciate that the people present felt we could move past it. It was a horrible error and one I'm really sorry I made.

What I didn't appreciate was the back-seat chairing from members of exec, either hurrying me, questioning my decisions, or straight up telling me to my face I don't have the right to do things I know I do.

Marc McCorkell, for example, stated baldly and plainly that the Chair of the meeting doesn't have the right to decide how the vote should be taken.

Awks.

Let's put aside the (extremely valid) arguments around the matter of anonymous voting and ask what the point of having a Chair is. If it's to parrot Executive, then there would be a provision in the Constitution for Executive to chair Council. There isn't. What there is is a clause stating frankly the contrary:

Awks again.

At this point we come to - for me - the very summation of the pointlessness of a) having a Chair and b) giving the power to interpret the Constitution to the Student President.

You see, Emily prefers that we do things her way. That's not what Council's there for, it's there as a body to oversee the work Officers do and to recommend policies that the student body would like to see enacted. It's not there to just do what the Student President would like it to do.

At AGM, Emily felt she had the right to yell accusations of racism at a room full of students because a vote she was hoping for wasn't going to go the way she wanted it to. I understand that. I agree with the sentiment, a room of white folk arguing that they don't agree with quotas (unless they're for medics) is a load of bullshit. 

That's not the point here though; the point here is that she sees bureaucracy as a barrier to things going her way. So she interpreted the constitution - which reads like this, as a reminder:

To mean

And there's no recourse. That's not an interpretation; if the last four years of literature study have taught me anything then it's that. You can't interpret a text to mean literally the opposite of what it says. But the Student President can. It's laughable. It's pathetic. I hope this doesn't happen next year. I hope if it does councillors can pull together enough voices to laugh the Student President out. It's just a giant abuse of power, and it's made all the more frustrating because (realistically) there's nothing to be done about it.

Speaking of things you can do nothing about: you need 350 signatures for a referendum and 1300 votes, half of which must be unanimously in one direction or the other (ie 651+), to make such a referendum valid. This is the only way to remove a sitting Officer. Guess in how many of the races for next year's team we got 1300 people to vote.

Answer: none.

That's right. You've got to get more people to vote in a referendum to remove an Officer than you do to get them elected. Should it be this hard? 

Rob would probably say yes. Rob has survived multiple motions of disapproval laid against him this year, not least because publicly voting against an Officer you'll have to work with tomorrow is incredibly intimidating. His response to every one of these has been to laugh when he inevitable survives the vote: I imagine he would say it's because you have to let personal attacks slide off. Personally, if someone is sufficiently pissed off with the way you're acting that they want to interrupt a meeting to make it known, you might want to reflect on why. Especially if it happens twice in one meeting.

But at this point of the year, secure in jobs after they leave here, I get the feeling they've had enough of the bureaucracy of the whole thing, and in that we agree completely. It's unwieldy, it's slow, and it takes far too long. I'm excited about the democratic review and the proposed changes; the move to a more online system is an exciting one and one I hope we can bring to bear soon. As a Chair or as a tutor, I seem to be most excited about things that will lead inevitably to me becoming surplus to requirements.

There's a lot more to be said about how Council went, not least among which was the alleged torpedoing of the UOTC. I'll write about it at some point this week but for now, thank you for reading. Here's Carmen by Stromae, covered on piano, to ease you back into the real world.

Post-elections blog

Today is the day that Terry Pratchett stopped breathing forever. Whether he died is still up for debate, mostly by him, because this was a man who knew the value of echoes. Lives don't stop when the liver stops breathing, he says. They stop when the last clock they wound stops ticking; when the last ripples of their lives stop affecting the flow of reality.

I'm paraphrasing, because if I look up his actual prose in this state I'm liable to burst into tears.

These three days have been intense. The two weeks before them, however, were just as intense. I am so proud, so incredibly, inarticulately proud, of the team and of Laura. She was incredible. She was resilient. She ran around in a superhero costume we made out of half-baked ideas and a lycra onesie. She was the living embodiment of an idea that 53% of the voters believed in.

Although quite frankly how could you not.

That poster, by the way, as well as all of the remarkable poster and website work, are the products of Gabi Lipan. Let me talk a little about Gabi.

If you can imagine a nuclear weapon driving a Porsche, then you're about halfway to Gabi. He oozes style. He redefines class. He is also probably going to explode from overwork before very long, because he was everywhere and doing everything. And remember that as a frame of reference, I'm using myself. I want you to think about that. I'm saying he works too hard. He will be the next Saatchi, if he can manage to ease up on the accelerator. If you run an ad agency, sign him now before he realises how incredibly bloody good he is.

It is admittedly very late at night and I have, admittedly, had a few shots. It is with this forewarning that I say this: I'm really proud of this campaign. I had a few good ideas, for which extremely kind people in the campaign have said I ran it the thing. No. Laura ran it, and she did an exceptional job of it. But I'm proud of the ideas I had, I'm proud of the advice I could offer, and I'm incredibly proud of every member of the team who put up with my joyless carping and endless rules about what and what not to do.

This year's team is a women-heavy,  LGBT-focussed team. There is still huge amounts to do. Coming after the debacle of the AGM, there is still a clear and cavernous gap between AUSA and its BME members. That has to change.

There is still a total lack of engagement - no more than 1100 votes for any position. That's terrible, but there's got to be a reason. Voting can't be made easier, so it's got to be because people don't want to vote. Why? I've had fruitful conversations already with new members of the team, and I hope they'll go and research and badger people until they explain what the issue is.

And then I expect they'll solve it.

Quitting

Giving up is one of the hardest things in the world to do. Human beings have a tendency to view sunk costs as retrievable, which they're not. If you've put five years into a relationship, you can't get them back - but people let it cloud their judgement anyway. If you've gambled a lot of money on an investment, you feel the need to find more money, in the hope you'll get it back.

I've invested five years, on and off, on the Students' Association here at Aberdeen University. I've seen a whole host of brilliant people come through, argued passionately for policies that made students' better, and for the past year I've been working hard on employability matters.

I've sunk a lot in, and at the start of this year I wanted to run for a Sabbatical role, to keep doing what I'm doing, to keep improving the student experience. I got my nominations in order, my team, my campaign prep - and then I sat down for two days and I thought about what I want to do.

And it's not this. I don't want to be elected. If I were to continue to work for students, I'd do it as a member of staff driving policy and supporting officers - but I don't think an election is going to give me that chance. I think that position is going to require someone who will be present, all the time, always focussed on the role and the responsibilities of that role.

I don't think Rob's done that this year. He's been absolutely brilliant fighting on education, but his work with me on employability has been non-existent. That's how he works, and to be honest I'm almost thankful to him for that, because it gave me the opportunity to take responsibility for projects that I might not have otherwise taken on. But I can't match that passion, and what's needed is someone who will continue to fight in the same vein as he has. That wouldn't be me.

This year I've learnt so much about employability, about placements, about how to generate interest for students to become more employable. More people than ever are attending university, and that's amazing, but it means graduates need to be able to show skills that they didn't have to before. This skilling up will become more and more important, and I'm confident that at the very least next year's VP Employability will work hard on that.

But all of this experience means nothing unless you can convince people that you're the right person for the job, and I'm not sure I can. I believe in my ideas; I'm confident they'll work.

But I don't think I'm the right person to make them happen.

I'm going to try to find a job out there in the world for a little while, and maybe one day I'll come back to student unions and bring the ideas of others to fruition - and maybe I won't.

But in the last year I've met someone who's made me a better person, who makes me feel invincible, whom I love. And although I've wanted to be in charge since I arrived - does anyone remember that awful, awful second year campaign? - I've realised there's something far more important. I'm not going to risk this chance at happiness for the sake of the Students' Association and its members.

So those are my reasons. I'm not looking to be elected: I want to teach, not to fight.

Besides, I want to find a cheap, one-bedroom flat in London to share with my partner and my cat. That's quite enough challenge for the moment.

Strrrrrressssss

I arrived in London on Monday night, checked into a hotel, woke up at 6 the next day, spent the entirety of that following day assessing and being assessed by Civil Servants, and then had an extremely robust Lebanese red in a wine bar where “measure” is considered a filthy word. 

Romantic + absurdly huge measures
= my kind of wine bar

For afters I went home, enjoyed a bath. You have no idea how glorious a bath is until you’ve not had one in months. I thought my skin was melting until I realised it was muscles unknotting. 

Then I stayed up far too late watching Bones. I was going to stop at 9 and go to bed, but then one of the characters started hallucinating Stewie from Family Guy and that’s the sort of thing you need an explanation for.

The explanation was "brain tumour," if you were wondering.

Today I got up at 6.30, made my way back into London, and spent the day talking up democratic procedures, Skills Awards (like our very own STAR) and how to encourage students to take up placements. That last one is something I’m particularly interested in, if only because there’s such a huge capacity for students in Aberdeen to take part in internships and placements over the summer. It can’t be denied that a lot of those are in the oil and gas industry – it’s an industry that hardly needs more help in damaging the planet, and most certainly one that we shouldn’t be encouraging students towards.

(With that being said, we can’t avoid the truth that many of our students will end up there, and so we – as an Association – need to ask ourselves how we can be both a lobby group for positive social change and a representative body for students who will work in environmentally damaging industries.)

Ah well. Maybe there are answers in sleep, which is exactly where I'm heading. My week so far has been exhausting. Tomorrow will be peaceful. 

Employability Week: Lessons learnt

Short form:

• You can't do everything
• You can rely on other people
• Sometimes, you need more than a week to do things (that's a tough one for me to learn)
• You can tell a horse about the water, where it's happening, and how good the water is, but you can't make it drink. Not even if it's been complaining of thirst.

Long form:

This was the week that I learnt that I cannot be everywhere, know everything, organise everyone. It's weird to admit that up until this point I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that if I only tried hard enough I could occupy multiple spaces at once.

Cat physics =/= human physics

I can't. I can try, and it will improve productivity, but there is an upper limit. That was my first lesson of the week, and the second followed on: I have to rely on other people.

On the face of it, this is a pretty obvious thing to say. I wouldn't have got to this point without total reliance on my parents (cheers Mum and Dad!), and I daily rely on bus drivers, lecturers, and a small army of internet-pixies to provide me with soothing cat pictures.

Ah. Soothed.

Yet putting this week together in the very limited time span I had meant relying, and relying heavily, on the brilliant members of my team and my effective and enthusiastic line manager. They absolutely blew me away with enthusiasm and encouragement - encouragement that included the line "You know, you should probably sleep."

The limited time span also limited who I could invite. Great speakers identified by the team turned out to need more than a week's notice (who knew!), which meant there wasn't the range of speakers I'd hoped for. With that being said, feedback has been mostly good, and if I were in a position to run it again next year I would start organising in about September.

It's also laid bare for me the truth that everyone moves at different paces, and some people are impossible to chivvy along. At that point it becomes a struggle, because moving at the pace of the slowest means no movement at all - but not everything can be done last minute in a panic. It's a tough balance to find. I'm making progress.

Finally: horses. This has really been hammered home to me today but all through the week, despite the calibre of the speakers, we struggled to fill seats. Some workshops had sign-ups of 25 and saw attendance at 20% of that. It's really, really frustrating, and obviously it lowers our standing with outstanding speakers. That's really, really annoying.

This problem is way more of a mystery, because I have to get inside the head of someone who signs up for a talk or workshop and then wilfully ignores reminders about it. Why do it in the first place? It's a puzzle. Perhaps it's our fault, for not engaging enough with students. Maybe next year there'll be t-shirted AUSA volunteers invading lecture halls.

I'm going to miss being a student because, whatever happens next, that part of my life is over. Whatever happens next, it's been an absolutely brilliant time, and if you're only just starting now - get involved with your Association or Union. Learn how to manage your time, organise a team, and run an event. Be the change.

This week keeps getting better and better

Alright, so this week has been another one of those weeks in which the days stretch like elastic. The week itself is so brief that you barely have time to make a cup of tea. To business!

There was a committee meeting at PIR towers on Monday, and the website is a-okay. There will hopefully be a new blog up there soon, telling of the exciting trip to Europe that other (significantly less impoverished) members took very recently. It'll be good to have some different voices up there, and with it ready to go we can start inviting writers from the general student populace to get involved. Pretty soon we'll have enough for our own journal. I've also started work on the final bit of the re-brand: a new banner. I'm gathering ideas for designs - it's going to be enormous, and may feature some faces. Now that's immortality.

Employability Week News: it's chugging along gloriously well. Speakers are coming forward, and I even got an email from someone today who's keen to "synergise" and "utilise economies of scale" and quite possibly "vertically integrate," though that last one sounds vaguely sexual so let's hope it's not that.

Over to Thirty Rock. What do we think of that presentation?




Aaaaaand back to me.

It's a mere 10 days away, and what makes it even better is that I'm out of office for a day next week. If I currently have an addiction to caffeine and my phone, then I don't think there's a word for the way I'll be during that conference.

Just to demonstrate my reliance on my black mirror: today I gave a presentation on body language, one that I'd never done before, entirely in French. My phone also switched itself off and wouldn't switch itself back on.

Take one guess which of these had me sweating like an ice cube on a blowtorch?

Speaking of which: that presentation was definitely one of the worst I've ever done, by virtue of a drastic misapprehension of the assignment. I understood I'd be talking for 45 minutes, and had it well spaced out and timed. I was actually going to be talking for 10 minutes. Have you ever seen someone accidentally change down to second gear going at 120 miles per hour?

That was what happened to my brain. The engine leapt out of the bonnet.

Still, we live and learn. Sometimes we live and learn by watching other people doing a much better job, which brings me to the presentation I watched. It was delivered by Eloise Leeson, who's a force of nature, and is on the subject of Public Speaking. I'd highly recommend looking over it, if you want to improve your Public Speaking - you'll find it at the end of this post and at this link if you're especially impatient.

I also had a fantastically productive meeting with the point-person for Global Jam - I'm doing my best not to be a micro-managing hoverfly but I can't help myself, especially when I know that because I'm relatively well-known (my narcissism is endless, matched only by my self-loathing) I can help smooth things over.

I've also taken part in an Interview Skills workshop, which was very useful, and now feel slightly more prepared for the interviews coming up. Oh hey, I've got an entire day of assessments in a fortnight. Smashing. I have time to prepare for that.

In opposite land.

Speaking of interviews - I had a fantastic phone call with an entrepreneurial hero. There might possibly maybe be a slim chance of a job in the quaintest, most glorious part of Englandshire there is - Gloucester.

Such England. Much pretty.

By contrast, Anna got an interview with Edelman and had it today. She kicked its ass all the way to Employment City, population (hopefully) us. We'll see how it goes, but it looks like the next month or two are going to be incredibly expensive, especially with the trips back and forth, graduation (with costs like forty-five British pounds to hold a plastic facsimile of one's degree) and moving to wherever we find employment.

Please let there be an employment-coloured light at the end of this tunnel.

That's been my week - teaching, logo design, and marketing-flavoured stuff are all light weekend projects.

Yup. Light weekend projects.

Up next: public speaking!

Kingsman: Go and see this movie right now

Well, one caveat before we crack on. There is a scene set in your stereotypical hate-group church, and out of absolutely fucking nowhere a homophobic slur and a racist slur are used one after the other. Obviously that's to set up the fact that these are truly irredeemably hateful people, and they really deserve the righteous destruction laid down upon them by Galahad.

Yes, the Kingsmen's codenames are the names of Arthur's knights. Yes, the fact that Percival is the one who completes the quest gives me a tiny pang of history nerd joy. And yes, the fact that the code name is passed on to the next holder of the position is a very clever nod to a fan-theory about James Bond.

All of these clever winks and nudges are small fry, however, to the balls-out action-packed quick-camera witty-dialogue trope-filled taking-the-piss-out-of-itself remainder of the film. There are a few examples I'd like to bring to the fore, and one of those is sponsorship.

Films need a lot of money, and some of that money comes from sponsorship. This comes in three flavours: subtle, obvious but we're not talking about it, and Kingsman.

Subtle examples can be found in Mad Men; the whisky they drink, the cigarettes they smoke, the cars they drive. Obvious but we're not talking about it, well...




Transformers: absolutely not sponsored by Bud Light but shit, Bud Light is accidentally in this movie a lot.

Then you can do it the Kingsman way, which is getting motherfucking Colin Firth, holder of an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, two BAFTAs, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire to say "Happy Meal" on screen.

There are no fucks to be given with this film and product placement. Guinness want to sponsor it? Great, let's have Colin Firth beat the spit out of five guys after they refuse to let him - and this is a direct quote from the film - "finish my lovely pint of Guinness."

Amazing. 

This is James Bond for the 21st century, but also for people who are turned off by the newer, darker Bond. This takes the campiness of Moonraker, dials it up to the point where the dial falls off and then keeps going. This is not any cheese, my friends, this is M&S, matured in the mind of a man who grew up on Roger Moore's Bond and delivered fresh to your eyeballs. From the cheesy villain to the 100% 80s Bond ending, this is a film for 25 year old men and women who grew up on their dad's 007 collection.

Men and women, mind. There is a whole lot of man candy to be viewed, and we get not one but two "strong" female characters. One: double-amputee assassin (not actually played by a double-amputee, which is deeply disconcerting because can there really be so few disabled actors?); and two: the secondary protagonist who has a deeply unsatisfying story arc involving being afraid of heights and then having to something at a high altitude. 

There's also a scene in which a whole host of people's heads explode in stylised, colourised mushroom clouds to the tune of Beethoven's Fifth. So that's something to keep an eye out for.

This film is, in the end, a riotous, ridiculous romp. The camera work is incredible. The music is perfect. At one point Colin Firth sets a person's face on fire with a lighter/flamethrower.

It's absurd, amazing fun.

Just could have done without those two words.