Day in the Life of an Academic Officer
The Officer roles can be something different from anything you might have heard of before and you might not know what an Officer actually spends their time doing. Below, I talk you through a day in the life of an Academic Officer. One of the best things about this role is that every day is so different but hopefully this gives you more of an idea about what an officer actually does.
8:00 – I arrive on Fusehill Street campus armed with my first coffee of the day and ready to start. I spend the first half an hour or so catching up on my emails, managing invites to meetings, and replying to some student messages. Over my time in office I have learnt it is best to do this sort of admin little and often otherwise it can pile up and become overwhelming very quickly. I have found I like to do it every morning as it helps me get into work mode each day.
8:30 – I chat with our student support team and find out what type of support issues the team are working on at the moment. Doing this fairly regularly gives me a better understanding of the trends they are seeing, and if needed I can focus my discussions with students/university staff to help address these.
9:00 – The union is recruiting two new staff members soon, one who will be focused on academic reps and one who will be focused on elected officers, campus reps, and all things campaigns. As these job roles align with my job role as an Academic Officer I will be on the interview panel. As part of this I have been asked to think of some interview questions for candidates. I spend some time thinking of some potential questions that aim to get a better understanding of a candidate’s experience, ideas, and to try and get the person best suited to the role.
10:00 – It is the start of the election period here at the Union where students are going to elect their next union leaders. There are ten campus rep positions available (2 per campus) and three officer positions (Academic, Activities, and Welfare). At the moment we are in the nomination period and are asking students to nominate themselves or someone else for one of the roles. To help raise awareness of the elections and answer questions students have submitted to us the officers decided to do a Facebook Live Q&A. I spend the hour beforehand prepping some notes and key facts about what we definitely need to cover and assigning questions to the different officers.
11:00 – After a little bit of technical issues we were up and running with the live. We answered all the questions and chatted about what each of the officer roles entailed, offered encouragement for anyone thinking of nominating themselves, and reflected on our time in office. Psst if you are thinking about nominating yourself, want to nominate someone else you can do that here: http://www.ucsu.me/nominate.
12:00 – Charlotte and I had a working lunch today as we had a meeting all about the rep and group awards. We worked with the union staff team to put together an initial project plan that looked at things like our aims for the event i.e. to celebrate student volunteer success. We also assigned some tasks to people such as working out our budget for the event.
14:00 – After a quick coffee run I was ready to tackle the second half of the day. I started writing this article you are currently reading and helped brainstorm/finalise some survey questions. This survey will go out to all reps and group members and will ask for their opinions of what sort of event they would like for their awards night. (Evening or afternoon, type of entertainment etc.) The results of which will be used to focus our event planning and help us plan an event most students will enjoy.
15:00 – Looking ahead in my calendar I know I have to submit a report for Academic Board soon. I know that I just submitted one to another board last week which can be used as a basis for this one. Meaning I just need to tweak it slightly for the audience, and make sure any figures and information are up to date. Boards tend to be every two months or so and as an Officer team we learnt that using one board paper as a basis for all of our boards every cycle, adding or removing information when needed to suit that boards audience, is the most effective use of our time.
16:00 – Finally, I round off the day with some personal development. The union encourages us to set aside some time every week to work on personal development as the officers position can only be held for up to two years. For me, I have enrolled in a course that will help me develop skills needed as a trainee teacher, as in September I am studying a PGCE. If you are elected into one of our roles you could use this time to do anything you wanted, maybe you’ve always wanted to learn sign language or coding – you can do that here!
