Hi everyone, new terms have now started at all the campuses; I hope the returning students are glad to be back and I’d like to welcome all the new students to SRUC.

This month I attended my first Dean Group meeting in Aberdeen and Student Experience Committee at Oatridge. Myself and Briony Dall (SRUCSA President) went to our first Education Board meeting, I was a bit nervous at first but I felt it went well. In the afternoon I attended my first Research Board meeting with Alex Brown (SRUCSA Post-Grad officer) it was a long meeting but it was very interesting to learn about the research side of SRUC.

I have now visited all the SRUC campuses after Briony and I delivered our staff presentation at Ayr. In the same week I gave the staff presentation in Aberdeen, both went very well and SRUCSA look forward to working with SRUC staff to ensure students can have a great experience studying here.

We had our first SRUCSA Exec meeting at Oatridge, it was a two day event where all the elected officers got together and discussed our ideas and plans for the year. We also reviewed funding requests and affiliation documents from a few clubs and societies. The exec team is always in regular communication but the exec meetings are a great opportunity for us to meet in person and meet students from each campus, our next meeting will be in Elmwood at the end of October.

On Sunday 28^th September myself, 5 students and 1 lecturer from SRUC Aberdeen took part in the Inverness 10K. With all my travelling around in the weeks before I didn’t do as much training as I’d like to have done, but was still very happy to finish in a time of 53mins 8secs – the rest of the team did it faster than me! It was a great day out and I hope that collectively we’ve helped to raise the profile of SRUC & SRUCSA.

John Savill (Vice Principal at The University of Edinburgh) visited the Aberdeen campus at the end of September. He was on a very quick tour but I met him briefly as he wanted to find out more about the students association and what campus life is like at Craibstone.

One of the Aberdeen lectures invited me into a 3^rd year statistics lecture to speak about my dissertation. Hopefully it showed students that although the stats class might not be everyone’s favourite, with your dissertation in 4^th year there is a definitely a benefit to learning stats.

With my office in Aberdeen it meant I got to meet many of the new students and take part in some of the freshers events, with my team winning the pub quiz! I now share my office with Claire and Craig (joint Aberdeen campus officers) and I’m really looking forward to working with them and the rest of the SRUCSA team over the year.

After running a survey to find out what students wanted, we now have a full range of SRUC clothing available online at https://www.srucsa.org.uk/srucsa-shop/ There have only been hoodies available in the past, I hope the new wider range of clothing will be a success and we’ll see plenty of staff and students proudly wearing their SRUC clothing!

With all the campuses now back from the summer, October will be a month where we will be continuing our class rep elections and training with many campus officers holding a campus council meeting on your campus – so why not get involved?

Thanks for reading.

Alex Robb