Student Life Pulse
The University of Surrey Students' Union are committed to understanding the lives of our students and their experiences at university. In order to do this, we are proud members of the Student Life Pulse, an online survey specially developed for student unions in the UK. The study will track the experience of our students throughout the academic year, as well as their perceptions and experiences of the Union itself. We'll use the information collected to develop and plan our services for the future and act as the voice of our students.
Between October and June you will receive an email inviting you to take part by completing the online survey. We want to hear the views of as many of our students as possible, so we hope you can spare a few minutes to help us with this important research!
The research is being administered by Alterline, an independent research agency. Alterline is an accredited research company which follows all guidelines for data privacy and security. It only has enough information about you to conduct the research and it will not keep any of your personal information after the research is finished.
Any information you disclose will be treated in the strictest confidence and the results are anonymised so no answers are attributable to any individuals.
Our Plan for 2019/20
We ran the Student Life Pulse survey last year, and we've been working on our plan for this year to address your feedback.
What will we be doing this year?
This year, based on the feedback you gave us through Pulse, we have identified 5 areas for improvement.
1. Making you more employable
We know how important your future is to you. We will be running the Employable Me scheme again this year, and are making the effort to work with all our student volunteers and employees to show you how to communicate the skills you've developed to employers or placement providers.
2. Positively impacting your wellbeing
You may have already heard of Nightline, but this year, Welfare Watch has been launched to support your wellbeing during Rubix nights, and will launch a peer support group in February to promote positive mental wellbeing. We've lobbied for changes to the Extenuating Circumstances process to better support you, and will be campaigning for more changes for next year.
3. Ensuring you can influence the decisions we make
This October we asked you suggest and vote for a campaign you thought we should run, and you picked Sustainability. The other top suggestions will still be worked on, but this main student-led campaign will now run all year. During SurreyDecides, we'll be encouraging you to get involved in running for election and voting, so that you have the opportunity to have your say.
4. Making sure our communications are relevant to you
We've been working on tailoring our newsletter content this year to make sure that you see stories that you're interested in. We have ongoing plans to increase our use of social media, and will be making use of Microsoft Teams to communicate with student volunteers to avoid relying on emails.
5. Effectively representing your academic interests
Your academic experience at Surrey is vitally important to us. We have encouraged our Course Reps to share their achievements with you so that you know what your feedback has achieved. Our Sabbatical Officer team will be out around campus to speak to you directly, and will be working with more student groups, such as postgraduate researchers and placement students.
If you have any questions about the research, please contact ussu.information@surrey.ac.uk
