Part-time International Officer Ushana, on arriving in Reading for the first time

Apa Khabar? ('How are you' in Malaysian)

I’m Ushana Gamany, RUSU's International Students’ Officer.

I’m a second year Law student from Malaysia. I’d like to share my experience of being here at Reading, so you know how amazing the University of Reading is!

When I came to here one year ago, it was the first time I had been to the UK and I had come alone.

However, I wasn’t worried….. well up until I was on the plane. That’s when everything began to sink in. I’m going to a place 7,000 miles away from home, I’m all alone, what if something happens? Who do I turn to and will I be lucky and meet lots of people as I always have or will everyone be different and I just won’t make any friends.

I was terrified for a while and it didn’t help when I arrived at my Hall of Residence.The first night I was scared but also excited.

The first day started a bit badly with me having no food and not really sure how to use the shower… yes I know what you’re thinking “What an idiot!”. Oh well I have my moments. Anyway,I went to the Carrington building at 8.30am and there was literally no one on the University grounds. I was starting to wonder if I was in the right place until more students started showing up. Registration went smoothly and I met a few students doing the same thing.

Then in the afternoon we went on a tour of the campus and town. There were friendly faces everywhere and all of us on the tour got to know each other. That night was Bollywood night and I went out with my flat mates and we just “clicked”. Everything fell in place after that and I never felt alone again.

I was really lucky to find such amazing friends. There was Alex from Moldova, Carlos from Chile, Joris from France, Carsten from Germany, Mihai from Romania, Joe Sun from Malaysia, Mike from China, Lara and Helena from Spain, Cathy from London, Jack and Jack from somewhere else in the UK (haha) and Alice from Italy.

Before going to University I already had an interest in being involved in a Students' Union as we didn’t have them in Malaysia as they have been illegal since 1971. I talked to the VP of Academic Affairs, Alex Slater, and he told me I could get involved by becoming a Course Rep and he was very supportive of my interest.

Not long after that, I stood for elections and got elected as 1 of the 3 First Year Law Course Reps. It was an enriching experience as I got to meet students and talk to them about their issues on the course. Then I would discuss these issues and voice these opinions at staff student liaison committees and sat on the Board of Studies Meetings at the Law School. I got to meet all the lecturers and at these meetings I didn’t feel like an inferior but rather an equal. It was a very different experience than I was used to with teachers back home.

I had also decided to join the Boat Club, Mountaineering Club, Caving Club, and the Law Society. Due to time constraints I ended up doing a little bit of each of it. However, I don’t regret it as I now know what societies and clubs I’m interested in joining and I’ve tried everything I wanted to try (almost). So I’ve decided to go with Mountaineering in my second year.

I had an amazing first year. I may not have gone to as many parties as some of my friends but I did get to do a lot of things and had fun during every single moment of the last year!

There are opportunities everywhere at the University, friends to make and people to meet at every corner. You need only take a small step and talk to someone. In my experience most people have been very friendly and helpful. Everywhere you turn there’ll be helpful people. It’s not very hard to find something you’re interested or passionate about either. It’s rare that you can’t find  a society that you like and if it there isn't, I’m sure you’ll find people who share your interests, so why not start a society yourself?

I have to say, some of my best memories and some of my closest friends are from Reading University. It truly has been an amazing year.

My advice to you is to be open to new experiences and to meeting new people. It will really open up your mind to new perspectives.

My main goal this year is to improve integration between home and international (includes EU) students and I will be running various campaigns to further this goal.

So if you have any problems whether it's getting lost on campus, housing issues, dealing with racism or just not coping that well with life, I am here to help. That’s what I’m here for, to help YOU. It doesn’t matter how small or big your problem is.

So feel free to email me at  internationalstudents@rusu.co.uk or drop into the Students' Union Reception and ask for me.

Ushana Gamany
International Part-time Officer
2nd Year Law Student

A Few Handy Safety Tips

Hi to all our Reading Freshers' and Returning students,

The RUSU Student Officers can’t wait to meet all our new Freshers' during Freshers’ Week and welcome back our Returning students for the Autumn Term.

This is an important time to remind you to keep your belongings safe while you are here. Criminals can target students and student properties because they know each one is likely to store a treasure trove of laptops, ipods, ipads etc.

Our friendly local police service the Thames Valley Police, has created a great list of things to remember, to help protect yourself and your property.

• Close it and lock it - don’t give burglars a helping hand. Make sure you lock your doors, rooms and windows when leaving your property
• Be smart – mark your laptops and cameras etc with security markers
• Immobilise – register all your valuables online to help catch thieves and keep a list of the make, model and serial numbers of your electronic items
• Don’t be a show off – keep valuables like laptops, mobile phones, ipods and expensive jewellery out of display in your home, car and when you are walking around
• Plan – your journeys - if you are going out, make sure you tell a friend. Don’t take short cuts and only use licensed taxis
• Never walk alone – walk with friends and in groups. Don’t make yourself more vulnerable
• Drink aware – enjoy your drink responsibly. Don’t leave your drink unattended and never accept drinks from strangers
• Don’t flash it – be wary around cash points
• Stay alert – if you see someone hanging around outside your house or halls, ask them who they are and be careful of letting others follow you into your building
• Shred – your personal documents before you bin them

Don't let this all worry you, but do make sure that you do all you possibly can to keep safe.

Our brand new 'Pay Later' Taxi scheme is also a great way to make sure you get home safely without having to worry about money after a long night out.

We are really excited about seeing you all in less than 3 weeks’ time and if you have any questions on Welfare then please do not hesitate to contact me!!

Sophie Davies

VP Welfare and Representation

A Big Welcome to all Reading Freshers' 2012!

Hey guys,

We hope the last few days haven’t been too stressful for you. It was only 3 years ago that the Student Officer team was sitting in the same place, having just been accepted at what we think is the best University in the world. The next 3 years are going to be some of the craziest, most-life shaping and wonderful of your life.

So, as you’ve been doing the countdown to find out what your future was going to hold, the Students’ Union has been powering full steam ahead to organise a brilliant year for you. The Students’ Union is here for many reasons but mostly to make sure that you’re University experience is the best it can be.

Your Union is run by students, for students. Your Student Officer team only graduated 2 months ago so we understand what you will be going through and hope you get involved as much as you can so you can shape your time here.

There are many things to take part in, whether that be by:

·        Playing a sport or joining one of our 105 societies

·       Getting involved in some amazing volunteering opportunities

·        Leading or helping us run some amazing campaigns where we can lobby the University, the local community or the Government to make real change

·        Joining up to be a Course Rep to speak up for your course

·       Finding our Part-time Officers who spend their time making sure we truly represent our students and see how you can get involved

Reading University Students’ Union (RUSU) also has a brilliant team of trained advisors who you can talk to about any financial, academic or housing needs. Their service is free and confidential so just come to one of the drop in sessions (Mon, Tues, Thurs & Fri 10.00am- 1.00pm and Wednesday 2.00pm-5.00pm) in the Students’ Union Hub or email them at with any concerns.There’s also some useful advice on our website.

We hope you have a fantastic day celebrating your results as we are getting excited about seeing you in just over 6 weeks.

Your Student Officer team is here to help you, so if you have any questions feel free to post on our Facebook page or feel free to email or tweet us. Our individual details can be found on the RUSU website.

We look forward to seeing you all at the end of September.

Your RUSU Student Officer Team,
James, Sophie, Kara, Nick and Ceri

Ready and Raring to Go!

Hello everyone!

I’m James Fletcher, your new RUSU President and together with Kara Swift (VP Academic Affairs), Nick Cook (VP Student Activities), Sophie Davies (VP Welfare and Representation) and Ceri Jones (VP Democracy and Campaigns) we make up your RUSU Student Officer team for 2012/13.



Student Officer team 2012/13  : (clockwise from top)
 James, Sophie, Kara, Nick and Ceri.



We are very excited about stepping into the big boots of the outgoing ‘sabb team’ and all the brilliant things that they have won for the students at Reading. The £600k library spend increase, changes to the way the Student Officers are scrutinised and the first ever elections for Part-Time Officers are just some of the amazing wins that they have achieved for us. I’m sure we would all like to thank them for being such great representatives and wish them every successes for the future.

On behalf of the new team I would like to thank all of you who elected us into office earlier this year in RUSU’s record-breaking elections. We are all committed to start implementing our election manifestos as soon as possible and we look forward to you keeping us on our toes at Student Officer Scrutiny. We will keep you updated on progress as it happens.

The new team will be working in and around our offices (located above The Hub) throughout the summer so if you are around, pop in and come and have a chat with us. We’re always happy to hear your thoughts, views and ideas. If you aren’t in Reading, just drop me an email or come along to one of our democracy meeting when term starts.  

Otherwise, we’ll see you in the Autumn Term for all the fun of Freshers’ Welcome Week!!

Have a great summer!

James Fletcher
RUSU President

Pathetic Fallacy, Last Orders and The Summer Ball

Afternoon all,

I, like all of you I’m sure, am pretty chuffed that the sun is out.  Campus seems like a different place, suddenly it’s awash with people as if the students of Reading  University are solar powered.  Of late, just having a scour over campus, there seems to be quite the element of pathetic fallacy what with the current weather. Now that them gloomy grey skies are out the way and the suns shining everyone seems a lot more chirpy.  The shorts are out, the dangerously misinformed donning the ever fetching “crocs” and those without sensitive teeth are straight in on the ice creams. Smashing.

Being ever the optimist I want to talk about what you’ve all got to look forward to once those exams are over! A minor distraction allowing you to procrastinate and have a peek at something coming up to get you through these last few days/weeks.

Perhaps I read too much into these things but to me the university year has a strange way of fizzling out.  There is a huge build-up of pressure around exams which starts before Easter which is way too early! As a student, every day seems to be a bit of a countdown, you struggle to maintain the motivation to keep going through the revision.  Then the day arrives that you finish your last exam… there’s a mandatory polite shandy or two…or three… or a couple of jugs of pimms followed by in my case a somewhat hazy evening.

Once the initial euphoria has worn off however,  you crazy Van Wilders out there ( you know who you are) no doubt will have a feeling like someone has just rung the bell for last orders at the bar a little bit too soon.  People start going home for the summer, it all ends a little bit too quickly.  This was definitely my experience last year, I loved every second after I finished exams, but it was all ending too soon, it didn’t seem as if there was a fitting way to finish all this university lark off.  That is until the Summer Ball came around…

It’s very rare that you have one of those evenings where everyone you hope to see will be in the same place.  Where there is the opportunity to round off the year or a period of your life on such a grand scale and where you’ll be given the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to people and the place that has played such a large part of your life over the last few years. 

I’m hugely excited about this year’s summer ball, a great line up, open for longer than ever before, a bigger festival tent than ever before, more acts, a bigger fun fair, more bars. It promises to be a brilliant event, In fact for the first time ever we are randomly selecting five lucky tickets for VIP treatment.  Those five people will get to bring three mates with them to a champagne reception, they will have access to our VIP lounge where they will be given a jug of Pimms, a bottle of Grey Goose vodka and iced buckets of beer.  They’ll be given food vouchers for the evening and queue jump for all the fairground rides. They’ll will also be given VIP stage views for all of the acts and most importantly they get a free breakfast in the morning!

While I was writing this blog I thought back to last year’s Summerball… I’m hopelessly in love with Ellie Goulding so it struck me as very odd that she is not the first thing that comes into my head when I do remember that evening…instead like the sentimental old man I’m become, I remember:

Being stood in a festival tent in the middle of a field at 6am, with the sun coming up, Slightly merry (one too many merry) , Singing Never forget by take that in an incredibly manly voice, my suit in an absolute state covered in hog roast apple sauce, looking around me and being surrounded by some of the best people I’ve been fortunate enough to meet.

That was what Summer Ball was for me, after that I remember feeling like I had done my bit with studying at Reading. I felt like I had said all the goodbyes that I needed to and had finished my time as a student on perhaps the best high I could have possibly done.

I hope that you all are fortunate enough to experience what I did last year at this years summer ball and that it’s a brilliant evening. Finally if on the 17th June at 6am if you see someone a little worse for wear in a slightly scruffy suit claiming to go by the name Ben Haines ensure that he makes it safely to Mojo's for a glass of water and some breakfast.

Cheers boys and girls

*winning smile/optimistic grin

See you all soon

Ben

International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia

Hello everyone, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ken Smailes and I am the outgoing President of RUSU’s LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans) Liberation Group and the RUSU LGBT Part Time Officer.

Today is an extremely important day for the LGBT community globally; it is the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia or simply IDAHO for short. This day is celebrated every year on May 17th to highlight that the unfair treatment of the LGBT community still happens around the world and still within the UK. It is a day for the LGBT community globally, to join together with the rest of the world and stand up against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.

To put the rights of the LGBT community into context, I want to give you a brief history lesson. In 1957 in the UK, Lord Wolfenden, who at the time was the vice chancellor of the University of Reading, wrote a report that called on the removal of homosexuality as an illegal act. It was with this report and continued pressure on the government that homosexuality finally became legal in the UK in 1967. Ever since 1967 the LGBT community in the UK has been slowly receiving more and more rights in their fight for equality. It was only in 2002 that LGBT couples, or single LGBT individuals were given equal adoption rights. Now it looks increasingly more likely that same sex couples will be able to marry. Yet these rights that the LGBT community have in the UK are not universal and even in the USA, in some states, LGBT people can still be removed from their jobs for simply defining as a different sexuality. Equality for the LGBT community has not been achieved in the UK or worldwide.

Unfortunately instances of homophobia, biphobia and transphobia are also still very real within the UK and the wider world. This unfair treatment of the LGBT community can come in many forms, whether it is physical harassment, murder, derogatory use of the word ‘gay’ or many other things, for many individuals it is all still too real an occurrence. I was shown this video by a member of the LGBT group recently and it really put the problem of homophobia into context for me:

Today is however a day to create change!

Yes homophobia, biphobia and transphobia is still a very real part of the LGBT communities life but we can all put an end to this, by simply standing up for the equal treatment of everyone. No one deserves to be treated differently just because they are of a different sexuality or gender or sexual orientation. Everyone is equal and we should show this through our actions.

Unfair treatment of anyone whether they are of a different race, gender, sexuality etc doesn’t have a place on our campus or within our community and let’s demonstrate this through our actions.

Ken Smailes
RUSU LGBT President and RUSU LGBT Part Time Officer

NUS LGBT Conference 2012

Ken Smailes 

NUS LGBT Conference, a weekend of drama, policy, motions, Manchester nightlife and development of LGBT rights. I can honestly say I have never been to such an encouraging and thought-provoking conference. The Reading University delegation decided that we would all write a blog/report so that you and the society can see how we voted on your behalf and to encourage you to get involved in the LGBT movement and the fight for ever-increasing rights. 

Over the weekend, I attended a number of different workshops, the most interesting and important to me was one titled ‘faith and sexuality, a dialogue’. This workshop had a lot of relevance to me as I grew up in a very Christian family and have always found the relationship between faith and sexuality particularly difficult to negotiate. The workshop gave advice and how to workshops to have an open and frank discussion about how sexuality and different faiths can work together; you don’t just have to have one or another. It was also really interesting to see how many people at conference both defined as LGBT and as with faith, which was encouraging.

The weekend was mainly filled with motion debate; these motions go into NUS LGBT policy and dictate how the campaign is run over the next year. I am happy to say that the majority of policy passed was brilliant, it included motions to encourage more work on helping trans people parent, sexual health, more equal representation of bisexual people and continuation of the campaign on ending the blood donation ban for men who sleep with men. The motion that did seem to be most controversial was that including Harry Potter and Dumbledore as a gay figure, this definitely brought some strong opinions from the conference floor. All these motions and discussion was really heartening but did make me want to stay on another year to be able to work on these new campaigns!

Lastly the highlight of the weekend for me had to be the NUS LGBT awards and Gala Dinner which celebrated 40 years of the NUS LGBT campaign. There were a total of six awards up for grabs and Reading University Student Union LGBT was eligible for 5 of these. I am very proud to say that we were shortlisted for three of them, which means we were in the top five for these categories out of nearly 100 institutions!! These were Campaign of the Year, Society Development Award and LGBT Higher Education Student of the Year. To get this amount of shortlists was incredible; it is testament to the work of the society, the amazing people in it and the lengths we have all come. You should all feel so proud of yourself and I know we are only going to get better year on year.

Ken Smailes

LGBT President and RUSU LGBT Student Officer