Undergraduate Education – Chloe O’Malley

Putting YOU 🫵 at the heart of UG Education (It’s a student’s world and uni needs to live in it)

Tell us about yourself and your campaign for Undergraduate Education Officer.

My name is Chloe. I am a second year BA Film Studies and Production student. So I would take a placement or an internship gap year during my degree if I get elected and that’s a big part of my campaign because I believe that it’s quite hard to separate myself from what’s happening education-wise in Queens because I’ll be going back to my degree afterwards. My campaign is mostly based around the cohort of students that we currently are where it’s quite compulsory for us to get our undergraduate degrees in order to get salaried jobs because many employers take it as a prerequisite and we’re also a cohort where on top of that we have a massively high cost of living and we are expected to be able to balance full-time education and nearly full-time hours working.

So what experience do you have representing students, whether it be in clubs or societies or in the SU?

Okay, well I think a really kind of fun more light-hearted one is I am the Film Society’s Social Media Officer so I very much represent the social media aspect. I love scrolling through reels on Instagram, TikTok. That’s actually a great way I keep in contact with my friends from home because some of them have gone on Erasmus, some of them have gone to different universities around the place.

Then I am also the School of Arts, English and Languages Undergraduate Representative. I was elected last year. So I represent students in academic boards, academic meetings and student voice committees where I meet with the undergraduate representatives from around the school and we talk about issues affecting everybody and implementing change. So I’m advocating for students currently with a new module type that I’ve been able to work on bringing in in AEL called SLICCs, which are Student-led Individual Created Courses. It was originally only meant to be for work placement, but however, I got a lot of interest from undergrads across AEL in bringing it in academically. And hopefully, given the success and being allowed to be rolled out next year, it will be looked at as an academic module.

What specific undergraduate issues do you think need to be solved or mitigated the most?

Oh, there’s so many. Okay. Cost of living is a big one, but that doesn’t just affect undergrads, it affects everybody. I was looking at an NUS survey where they found that around 69% of students across undergrad and postgraduate are working while doing their studies. So if we took that to the 25,000 students in Queens, that’s a massive proportion of us. and we are one of the first cross-border universities, but one of the only universities on the island of Ireland that does not subsidise food and drink on campus for students and similarly a lot of UK universities also subsidise food and drink. So I would definitely want to tackle the cost of living here on campus because I mean, I’m vegan and I would get surcharged for coffee, but like I’m paying £5, which is sometimes almost 7 euros for food and drink.

Also, making sure that our academics are working for us. We’re in a very employer-focused world where these degrees are compulsory for our jobs. Employers are also looking for things that we’re doing on top of it, societies, volunteering, everything and the skills that we earn, and I’ve found from doing the degree I’m currently doing in our practical modules, some lecturers will mention doing these specific workshops like we built a specific type of rig for film and we were told to list that as a skill because an employer will look for that – trying to implement that more into our studies and making sure that students are getting an education experience that’s working for them and working to get them the best opportunities they can when they get out of here, but also not overworking them.

Training our faculty to remember that students are working and training them to kind of deal with those issues because there’s a number of students who’ve come to me and said that faculty have not been empathetic of the fact that they have to go home and work because many students couldn’t get jobs here in Belfast because of how overpopulated the student cohort is, and how few jobs there are and they have been told they have to figure out how to do an assignment that they’ve been given like a reading week time frame for that they can’t do because they’re gone working full-time.

You mentioned the SLICCs, the Student-led Individual Created Courses. Could you elaborate a bit more on what it is and what you hope to do with it for undergrads?

Absolutely. I adore SLICCs. So one thing… They were a format that was introduced by the University of Edinburgh and I believe that they’re being rolled out in Waterloo as well currently. But the model that I like to look at is the University of Utrecht module because it’s a partner school of Queen’s and we run the summer school with them. And then I had also actually lucked to doing a semester abroad there, but I couldn’t because there was issues with funding. My parents allowed me to go. It’s incredible. Basically, the name is quite self-explanatory. It’s student-led and it’s individually created. So the model in Utrecht is run by the honour school, where students come together in groups and they pitch a model they want to take on.

Where groups of students come together and they pitch a module that they want to take to faculty and it’s facilitated. So they make sure that it’s accredited. They bring in either guest lecturers or they bring on staff on board and the students shape both the module and their assessment. So students are being assessed in the best way that suits them because we’ve got such a diverse cohort of students that rigorous academia, just doing essays, just doing exams doesn’t work anymore because you’re setting students up to fail and burning them out. then the current model that I’m working on is for work placement, which means that every student will have an advisor.

So I think it’ll potentially be one advisor for like a classroom of students and it means that the students shape how they’re like assessed for their work placement around what they’re doing which could be if like using my degree as an example if I was working in say an editing house I’d be able to do a video essay I’d be able to make an edit of like clips of footage from my time or things that I’ve worked on while I was there rather than the current work placement model which is creating reflective essays and doing a learning journal quite quite long after you’ve done your work placement. So they don’t know what they’re meant to be trying to learn while they’re working. And it’s just a way of putting students at the heart of their education that is only done in a couple of universities, hasn’t really been done here before, and would actually be a game changer for everybody.

Your campaign in five words or less…?

Cost, care, pink hair. (hippo)

What’s the favourite event you’ve hosted at the Film Society?

The formal. I’m going to Glinda. So, because it’s Wicked themed; I suggested the Emerald City this year so it’s got a very special place in my heart.

You can read Chloe’s manifesto here.