April is Stress Awareness Month, and I have writen a piece for Augustine House Library. I have written about my love for blogging and writing poetry (particularly NaPoWriMo). I noticed one of the suggestions on the Library blog is to try the 30 day April challenge. I picked bullet journalling, riding my bike, and more matcha lattes.

But, you know, I’ve changed my mind?

I’ve been indirectly dealing with something that is causing me so much stress this year (well, someone I care for is dealing with it, and it’s hard to see what they are going through) so I figured why not do something bigger?

Next month I’m going to rearrange and redecorate. Starting with a paint job.

I’ve actually had a busy couple of weeks, and now I am on holiday. I forgot I was on holiday until a few days ago. It has been a pleasant surprise. I intended to return (physically) to college today but then I looked in my calendar and saw I had a bunch of NUS-related meetings in preparation for the NUS Conference next month so I thought that maybe I ought to book some days off… it turns out I already had.

I had an informal interview for one of the Santander Internships and it looks very promising, and exciting. I am reluctant to talk about it because it hasn’t been set up yet but it’s a three week placement in one of my favourite charities. And it links nicely to the work I do around widening participation and student unions.

I had my final workshop with Claud and the Rocket Artists yesterday. I enjoyed saying goodbye and looking at our work over the past five weeks.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNAuQEeFL2-/

I’m still a volunteer observer for two other classmates, but I only have three more sessions with them. I love working with my classmates, but unfortunately their workshops clash with my day job so I have to work time in lieu and reschedule my weeks… which is tough! Here are my next four weeks:

And that’s not even counting my plans for the rest of my holiday.

In case you haven’t received your email from Brighton Students’ Union, I’m one of the NUS Delegates next year.

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Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

I promised you a stats post and here it is. The data is from the end of the election and sits at brightonsu.com/studentvoice/elections (I have also saved a copy at web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.brightonsu.com/studentvoice/elections).

stats from brightonsu.com/studentvoice/elections at end of election

Breakdown

Year of study

Year 0 (Foundation year): 6
Year 1: 207
Year 2: 210
Year 3: 229
Year 4: 24
Year P (Placement?): 3
Others: 3

All students

Grand total: 680
Others: 3

Campus

City: 79
Eastbourne: 27
Falmer: 137
Moulsecoomb: 436
Others: 4

Schools

Sport and Service Management: 12
School of Art: 15
Brighton and Sussex Medical School: 23
School of Education: 24
Environment and Technology: 25
Health Sciences: 26
School of Media: 34
School of Computing, Engineering and Maths: 38
School of Applied Social Science: 46
School of Humanities: 91
Brighton Business School: 96
Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences: 241
Others: 12

My reflective writing groups feel like they are getting towards a good place.

screenshot of cccu.sharepoint.com/sites/lifewriting

The Canterbury Christ Church University group is more complete, however it’s not the main location of my research. My goal was to create a page/place that could be easily replicated across other college/university systems – and it worked!!! Easy peasy. Honestly, it was a chef’s kiss moment. It took half an hour to copy and fix any broken links (and half of that time was doing layout work and rerecording my voice on my how-to video).

screenshot of unibrightonac.sharepoint.com/sites/Group-j/

The University of Brighton group is structurally sound (I’m just asking some classmates to do some user testing at the moment), but needs a lot of work. The front page is the participant information sheet, and I’m 18% complete with that! Most of my research will take place within University of Brighton so I will spending probably another three hours writing/revising here.