Postgrad Students - "Where the bloody hell are you?"

I have posted very little about the ANU's Postgraduate and Research Students Association (PARSA) of late, but as I said a couple of posts ago, I haven't said a lot about much at all of late. PARSA has probably consumed more of my time than anything else these last 2 months, and so does deserve a bit of a summary. In truth, times have been pretty tough for the association, due mainly to a rather sudden drop in numbers, and a lack of new recruits to fill their places. Due to some woeful organisational and scheduling decisions by the ANU's student administration during O'week (and complete ignorance of our interest in this week), and perhaps an error of judgement on our part, we missed out on an opportunity to introduce ourselves to the hundreds of postgraduate students who enrolled that week. To their credit, student admin have acknowledged their mistakes, and promised to work more closely with PARSA next time.

From a personal perspective, PARSA has been quite a strain, but as things now look to have settled down, I do feel a certain sense of satisfaction about what I have done. While one never wants to indulge in self congratulation too much, I am pretty happy with what I have achieved. Two months ago, the Social and Outreach team consisted of just 4 members (down from about 11 or 12 at its peak last year). As of this week, our membership looks like being more like 8 people, which is quite a relief. Two months ago, the S&O team had no employed help to assist with the planning and coordinating of social events. We now have a fantastic Social and Publications officer, working for PARSA 10 hours a week. I was one of two people on the selection committee (the other being Diane, PARSA's Administrator). I must say, this was quite an enlightening experience, but also a time consuming one.

Perhaps my proudest achievement, however, is the introduction of a new initiative to try and reduce the load of student reps involved with social events by building up an army of social helpers. This was inspired by the drop in numbers, and lack of people willing to join the representative council. Through an intensive email and poster campaign, the social team now has about 12 postgraduate students who have agreed to be "social helpers". So, in addition to the 8 or so PRC members, we now have 12 helpers. This, as you can imagine, is quite a relief given the state we were in at the start of Feb.

With all these things in place, and the task of leading the team becoming significantly easier than it was a few months ago, I have now managed to find somebody within the team, to take over the job of team chair after me. I have been team chair for almost 10 months, which is 4 months longer than it should be. If all goes to plan, I should be completely free of chair duties by mid May.

I am pretty excited about this. Not because I don't like being team chair, because for the most part, I do. The issue is more about the restrictions such a role places on your ability to do other things, both within PARSA and outside of it. I have been unable to put my hand up for other things, which has sometimes been disappointing because my interests in PARSA do go beyond the social events we run. I also firmly believe that in the longer term for PARSA, there is no benefit in having any one person perform the same duty for their entire time - what happens when they suddenly submit their resignation and leave (which is often how it happens), and no one else has the experience or inclination to step up to the role. To some extent, this is exactly what has happened to PARSA over the last few months. A lot of very good people have resigned (occasionally postgraduate students do crazy things like graduate!), and finding people willing to take on the intimidating
task of filling these roles is difficult, but such is the nature of volunteer-based organisations.

So I guess in summary, things are looking much better now that the recruitment drive has succeeded, and we have someone paid to make sure our events run smoothly. And yes, I am unashamedly proud of my own efforts to get things back on track. I should say, there are other people in PARSA, like our president Brett, who have put in huge amounts of time and effort to get PARSA on its feet, and prepare for the introduction of Voluntary Student Unionism on July 1st. The fact that we will survive the introduction of this legislation is a great credit to those who have negotiated and fought for student representation at ANU.