As you will have hopefully seen from my Tweets, I have been busy with the ‘Made a Difference’ awards, which is the student led staff awards and celebrating the success of student reps. The awards ceremony is at the Crowne Plaza, so I have been organising decorations and fundraisers to help towards the costs and generally organising the event.

So far for the nominations for staff we have had just under 1000!!! This is fantastic and really shows that there are staff members making a difference to your time at ARU. If you haven’t had a chance to fill one in then you still can until the 23^rd March.

I have also been working with student reps, to get feedback on the VLE, to see how it works currently and what you would like to see it do in the future. This is being developed into a monthly meeting with university members of staff, so that the developers of the VLE know what students’ priorities are.

You will also see from my tweets that I have been doing a lot of reading for the periodic reviews, this is when internal and external members of university staff and I (representing the SU) review departments. This means we look at the last three years of documentation, I have currently read 3 sets of papers out of 5. It is a great way to see the experiences you are having in your courses and helping develop them further.

I am also working with the university to try and make the understanding of good academic practice more engaging and help you understand what plagiarism and other poor academic practices are so that you don't get caught out.