Undergraduate Education – Jay Basra

A Vote for Basra is a Vote for Change.

What is your campaign for UG Education Officer fundamentally about?

I’m a History and Politics student; this is my last year. I’ve been involved in the School of HAPP for quite some time. I was a School Rep for this year, I ran last time and previous times before that. I’m very passionate about ensuring undergrads have the knowledge and the idea of what the SU works like and ensure that they do have that representation.

Personally for me the main message of this campaign is to show that the SU doesn’t always represent them through the assistance we have and they’re quite bureaucratic in nature. For example I’m the HAPP School Rep and I don’t know what to do; they don’t really give us any advice. There’s literally nothing you can do by yourself, you have to go through the staff and it’s up to their whim of what a meeting is called for the Student Voice Committee and it doesn’t really feel truly representative – you’re just sort of there as a token almost in committee meetings and board meetings.

What would you say have been your general experience representing students – your challenges and the achievements that you’ve got through that?

I think the most achievements I ever got is through the Student Council, but I haven’t really seen much through the school. There’s very little communication I find between people that run the Student Voice and ourselves as Reps. We’re just there as placeholders, the chair of the meetings. It just sort of seems like a skeleton almost. There’s no real proper engagement. Even how a meeting is structured, we can raise issues but it just sort of seems to bounce back and forth. and they seem to express a position that nothing can be done as well. The staff that are involved in these meetings and you just sort of feel that there’s no real way of penetrating or changing policy. It’s done at a higher level than us.

What specific issues do you think need to be solved or worked on for undergraduate students that you know of?

I think there’s that policy of AI being inconsistent across the schools. Schools having their own views on what AI issues can be. It’s very difficult for those who have joined honorary degrees. I know they’re trying to work on it and improve that. There’s the main university policy and there’s different schools. Schools differ throughout the university. It’s incoherent. You have plenty of examples like that. As well, I feel a lot of students don’t feel they’re getting much out of their degrees anymore. So much of it is online based. They’re not actually having to retain information. There’s no point going to a class or lecture. You stay home and watch a lecture and read the material. So there’s little incentive to actually turn up nowadays. There should be that incentive to come and listen and actually participate.

You mentioned about communication and engagement within, say, the School of HAPP itself. How do you think, as an undergraduate education officer, you’d be able to mitigate those problems?

From what I’ve seen in HAPP, there has to be a truly representative form of students actually engaging because I think more often than not the stuff’s heard by the school or by the university and it’s not action. There’s no real meaning or push behind that. And maybe that’s an issue to do with the fact that we, it’s the Undergraduate Representative that has to push these things themselves, the full-time officer that is. Maybe that’s the problem.

But there is that real issue of just trying to get things out of that room and actually actioned. And it just sort of gets lost. You don’t really see the minutes. You see the minutes afterwards, but you don’t really see any action coming from it. And when the meetings are scheduled, it’s always at awkward times on a Friday when no one’s actually in the university. So you’re getting a handful of people to give you their view on what’s happening. And they’re usually quite representative. They’re students from across the courses and they’re doing the best they can. But where does it come from? Where does it go after that? There’s no real end point. We’ve no idea how to actually assess it as well because you just sort of sit there and chair the meeting. You don’t really provide an opinion. You just sort of seem that you’re being there as a controlled opposition so to speak. You’re just sitting in that chair as a student’s representative and there’s nothing more than that. It’s kind of stagnant I suppose.

What would you say are your main three points of criteria for success as a UG officer?

I think reforming our AI policy will be one of the things and ensuring that it’s cohesive and that we don’t have any sort of divergence across the schools and policies because that just causes confusion for students who are joint honours.

Second policy would be clear on how student engagement and representation works in the union. There needs to be an ability for undergrad students to actually have an input and what goes on and actually have their voice heard and not just simply ignored or just get lost in the paper trail because things move very, very slowly in the university. You can communicate things three years ago when you first came in and you’ll not see it till maybe you’re graduated two or three years. And that’s been a problem we’ve seen from the societies I’ve been involved in, the engagement we’ve had, the stuff doesn’t get action for years and years and years. and when it finally comes around nobody actually remembers that being discussed in the Union so it works so slow so change comes so so slow down the line: it has to change it has to be more representative and in line with the student academic life, so to speak.

And probably the third point is just to ensure that students are being provided for in the union, that the Union is – at the end of the day – there to represent their beliefs and what they are as students, not just simply to act as an organised opposition for the university’s stable representation of these people in these meetings. They sit in the chairs of student representatives, they sit in the board meeting, but really what contribution are they making, what contribution can they make? You know, just not having a body there but actually having a purpose behind that individual.

Your campaign in five words or less…?

Change.

About your social media campaign. Why do you dislike Larne so much?

Oh, no, just… No, it’s because Larne. Why would you not bully Larne? What does Larne represent? It represents my dislike for bureaucracy and unnecessary existence. So unnecessary just like the bureaucracy in the union…

You can read Jay’s manifesto here.