What experience do you have working as part of a team and acting collectively as a group?
As an apprenticeship student I spend four days a week I'm working, leading and coordinating teams within a large financial-services company, and one day a week I'm studying. That's a different shape of experience to a typical full-time student's, but I think it means I bring real experience of working within a professional team. Leading a team isn't something I did once for a module, it's what most of my week actually looks like.
Right now, day to day, I'm accountable for a portfolio of 10 to 15 projects running at once, with colleagues spread across the UK, remote, and India. A recent example that shows real collective working under pressure: when a critical performance issue hit one of our core platforms, I coordinated the response across several departments, running daily calls, keeping a shared action log, and making sure everyone, engineers, other managers, senior stakeholders, were pulling in the same direction rather than working around each other. That turned into a longer-term investment programme that several teams are still delivering together today.
What I'd bring to the Board is that same instinct, built from doing it week in, week out: make sure everyone actually has a voice in the decisions being made, not just a vote afterwards.
What experience do you have of communicating and building relationships with others?
Communicating well and building real relationships is central to my day job, not a separate skill I have to reach for. I regularly have to communicate difficult concepts clearly to people at very different levels, from engineers in my team to senior executives. One example: I've had to tell a company executive that a project was going to be late, when they were about to have that conversation with a regulator. That's a genuinely different register of communication to reassuring a nervous team member, but they're both about being honest and clear rather than telling people what they want to hear.
I also build relationships with people I don't formally manage. When contractors join my organisation to run projects, they're often sent to me to get up to speed, and part of my job is helping them understand how we work and building enough trust that they'll come back and ask rather than guess.
I try to build relationships based on honesty rather than just being agreeable, which sometimes means harder conversations early rather than easier ones that store up problems for later.
What do you think are some of the key issues impacting student life and the Students' Union currently?
Cost of living is the big one, and I don't think that's going away any time soon. Rent, food, and energy costs all remain genuinely difficult for most students, and I know from Hallam SU's own current campaigns that this connects to specific things like student transport costs and nighttime safety, both of which are live campaigns right now.
I'd also want to raise something closer to my own experience: apprenticeship and part-time students. I'm doing my MSc as an apprentice alongside a full-time job, which is a genuinely different experience of university, less time on campus, different financial pressures, different support needs, from most full-time students. I don't think that group's needs are always visible in how a Union thinks about student life, and I'd want to make sure they're properly represented at Board level, not just full-time, campus-based students.
Both of these matter to me for the same reason: making sure the Union recognises and supports all it's students regardless of background, location, or study format.
What does equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) mean to you and how will you consider this in your role?
EDI isn't abstract for me, it's personal, though I'm conscious my own experience of it is really just one lens among many, disability isn't the whole of what EDI means, it's race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic background, religion, and international and cultural background too, and I wouldn't want to assume my own experience speaks for all of that.
Where I can speak first-hand: I went through university once already, years before this MSc apprenticeship, without knowing I was autistic. Being diagnosed since then has been genuinely eye-opening, I can see, with hindsight, exactly the kind of support that would have made a real difference back then. I've actually experienced that difference this time round: the inclusive support I've had access to at SHU has been genuinely helpful, and it's given me a real appreciation for what good support looks like when it's made available. I also have a disabled son, and navigating an Education, Health and Care Plan for him has given me direct, practical experience of what it takes to make education genuinely accessible in practice.
What that's taught me, though, is a general instinct I'd want to bring to every part of EDI, not just disability: actively ask whose experience isn't represented in a decision, rather than assuming it's covered, and take the time to actually listen to people whose experience is different from mine rather than filling that gap with my own assumptions.
Vote now