5 reasons why I desperately want all of the students to come back.

1. King’s is a lonely place without the hustle bustle of students. I know that there are postgraduates hiding away in their research caverns somewhere – but as this is thesis/dissertation writing up time, it’s probably best that I don’t go bothering you all.
2. I’m not handing over to anyone, and this month is set aside for handing over to people. I’ve enjoyed doing work experience at Allen Edwards Primary School, but that was weeks ago now.
3. Some of the College staff have gone on holiday, and rightly so, it’s been a tough year – but this does mean that lobbying might have to go on hold for a while, though. I am having a meeting next week about graduate stipends but it’s definitely slowed down here.
4. I’ve been planning and planning and planning and now I just want to get started. I’ve got a plan for liberation, a plan for the Aldwych Group (of which I’m chair), a plan for representation, a plan to quash bad use of TurnitinUK – I just need some students to join in and it’ll all fall into place. But there aren’t many (see point 1).
5. I’ve run out of friends. They’ve all graduated, or finished their years as sabbaticals or moved back home for the Summer. Or they’re on electives.

Come back students,

Emilie

Immigration Cap?!

I’ve just come back from the Aldwych Group’s first meeting of the year. Coincidentally, the theme of the meeting was Internationalisation. I say coincidentally because we all awoke after the weekend to see Students becoming yet another political pawn in the coalition’s game of populism – this time the finger is pointing at international students.

The UK has been resting on its laurels in Higher Education for a very long time. It takes a lot to prove that international students are more than just a cash-cow for universities running up a deficit. International students come here and are often hugely disappointed with our facilities, nothing on the facilities available in the US. Nonetheless, International students come to the UK to learn because we have some of the best institutions in the world. Not to steal our jobs and our women, heck they aren’t even able to steal our university places – the government controls UK student numbers and not how many international students an institution can take on!

International students are placed under incredible scrutiny by the UK Border Agency, try failing a year or having to retake a module if you’re an International student! If you team this up with the fact that international students pay sky-high prices in a completely unregulated market to come and study the same courses as UK and EU students, it does make you question why they would bother to come over here at all. For years, international students have been forced to carry around those pesky ID cards that the rest of us have campaigned against and none of us even batted a eyelid when that happened. One sabbatical officer from the Aldwych group explained how he had to tick a box that said “I am not a terrorist” whilst applying for his visa to stay on.

Internationalisation is absolutely vital to Higher Education. Any one that doubted this fact should have been at the Aldwych group meeting on Thursday where Paul White the PVC for Learning and Teaching at Sheffield University gave an inspiration speech about the importance of the internationalisation of Universities. Higher Education has changed. Students go to university because they want to get good jobs. Business has changed. Most businesses consider themselves as global businesses. They want global graduates to do their global business, globally and what better place to learn how to be a global graduate than at the home of one of the most global languages .Paul White spoke of ‘global agility’, employers wants students that can get thrown in at the deep end and respond to being out of their comfort zone efficiently. He encouraged UK students to become as international as possible. Take part in Erasmus schemes, study abroad, and travel. Let international students do the same.

Internationalisation is more than just building for better business. Internationalisation for the Russell Group institutions means better research. ‘The best and the brightest’ as Damien Green calls them are researching for us, across the UK at our top research institutions and across the globe at research institutions in China, the US and so many other countries. Immigration caps don’t only affect international students, they will affect the numbers of top research staff our institutions can employ, dramatically reducing our ability to compete in the global research domain. For a research institution, the outcomes of these sorts of outcomes are unfathomably negative.

But internationalisation means something even more valuable to me, and hopefully to some of the students I represent. Knowing as many international students as I have had the pleasure of knowing across my 4 years at King’s, means that I am aware of the immense world outside of the M25. Watching Obama’s inauguration and seeing students from the US crying with relief. Meeting Chinese students during plagiarism workshops and learning about the differences in pedagogy across the world. Watching the Superbowl at 4am on a Monday morning. Japan Society teaching UK students how to make origami and sushi in one of our student centres. Learning the cultural differences between Saudi Arabia and Staines. These are the things I am going to take away with me from my time at King’s. These are the reasons why having international students is so important to me. Life is so much bigger than the UK, and it’s time that our politicians and those commenting with such misinformation on various websites across the country realised this – before it’s too late and we’re left behind.

peace out

Emilie