Training - 3 Weeks In

Hello and welcome to my blog as Vice President Housing and Community (Elect - Naush would still want me to say). This is obviously my first post, as you can see by the fact that there are no other posts yet. I hope everyone is having a great summer and I thought I would take the opportunity to just blog a little bit about the training the rest of the team and myself have been going through since 1st July.

There has been much to get through already from speed dating the departments of the Guild to wearing ridiculous hats, from our Crystal Maze-like tour of the Guild which ended in some, may I say less than dignified behaviour to a very eventful 24 hour team building day! This executive team has been through it all and we've only been together for close to three weeks. I am confident that we are the right mix of styles and personalities and we will manage to effect the change you elected us for.

Tom Marley (Vice President Education and Access), Hollie Jones (Vice President Welfare), Mark Smith (Vice President Sport) and myself have just returned from, without a doubt, the most intense part of the training so far: the NUS course, Active Political Leadership. We met sabbatical officers from across the country and were intrigued to find out how our union compares to others. We also learnt how to build strong and active unions, while talking about leadership, power and contributing to workshops that will hopefully give us the skills we need for the year ahead. This was all tied together in Fibchester 2008 where the NUS create a fake town and fake university: you become a fake executive team and have to deal with all that NUS throws at you! I certainly felt after the end of the three hours that if I can deal with the local residents of Fibchester, my Community strategies should be successful in Birmingham because the local residents of Fibchester were horrific.

Anyway I'll leave you with a few pictures of our training so far: the first is the team in our different coloured hats - mine has a red tip because I am, according to the rest of the team, passionate, fiery and emotional about the things I care about but neutral and considered about other issues. The second is of me about to stab our play-doh representation of the university in a very sarcastic portrayal of our year in office, we are of course looking for a strong, respectful working relationship with our partner institution. Hope anyone reading this is well and enjoy your summer, I'll keep you posted, thanks for reading!