8: Student voice and how to get involved

Graduate Student Staff Liaison Committee

The MRes/PhD GSSLC (Graduate Student-Staff Liaison Committee) is an important platform for you to have your say and provide feedback to us. Students get together with Departmental staff to discuss issues that concern their learning and teaching experiences. The GSSLC is made up of elected representatives (known as course reps) and members of staff, but the GSSLC is student led with the course reps taking on the roles of Chair and Secretary in the meetings. Even in the best departments, there are always some issues that need to be discussed and addressed. Yet the GSSLC is more than a ‘complaint box’. The Committee has also been very useful in the past to simply ask questions that were unclear to many students. This makes the GSSLC a good opportunity for students and the Department to communicate. You can communicate to your student representatives via email. For further information please see our dedicated GSSLC webpageLink opens in a new window.

Issues that have been raised in the past include access to material in the Library, questions concerning IT facilities as well as aspects of your learning experience and examination and some issues addressing more long-term matters such as curriculum development. At the same time, the GSSLC is not intended to address special problems that concern only one individual student. Often these issues can be more efficiently resolved if the student speaks to the Postgraduate Office or to the module teacher concerned.

GSSLC agenda items should be those which concern the general population of Economics postgraduates, and not generally not be a channel for evaluation of individual modules. This should be done via the module evaluation process. However, if course reps feel that there are some issues about individual modules that have been raised with the module leader which have not been addressed, they are free to raise these in the GSSLC meetings.

During the academic year, GSSLC representatives will meet with staff from the Department four times. It is important to make good use of the meeting time by being full prepared with an agenda that can be circulated to all student and staff members in advance. This will allow staff members to investigate your issues prior to the meeting and to hopefully be able to provide help and clarification during the meeting.

How GSSLC representatives are elected:

1. All students are asked to submit a candidacy.
2. The Department hosts online voting.
3. Elected representatives agree on Chair and Vice-Chair.

Some useful things to know if you become a GSSLC representative:

• There will be up to six representatives from the MRes/PhD programme.
• Out of these a Chairperson will be chosen, whose main task is to chair the GSSLC meetings.
• The Vice-Chair/Secretary has to take minutes of the meetings and replaces the Chair in her/his absence. The minutes are circulated to all students so they know what’s going on.
• The first thing to do for the representatives is to look at last year’s GSSLC annual report to get a feel for what has been discussed.
• It is also useful to begin each meeting with an update on how the issues of the last meeting have been addressed since then.
• Before each meeting, the MRes/PhD Office will ask you to prepare a list of items to be discussed. All the representatives, and the Chair/ Vice-Chair in particular, are responsible for collecting these issues and sending them in on time.
  
• Ask your fellow students what they think about the courses.
• The Chair and Secretary are responsible for preparing the Annual Report and submitting this to the Student Union.
• Your job is to help the students and the Department to communicate. If you are willing to carefully listen to both, and if you like to communicate and to analyse problems, you will be able to make a great contribution indeed.

The Warwick Students' Union provide training and a handbook for all course representatives and there is a code of practiceLink opens in a new window, which all course reps should be familiar with.

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