Policy Focus Points

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Due to the current global pandemic, we decided to continue most of the focus points of the previous council. A reason for this is that we value these points and don’t want the time that went into these projects last year to go to waste, since most of them abruptly came to an end due to the Covid-19 virus.

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1. FSR Structure

Keywords for the FSR structure: continuation plan.

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Continuation plan

For the FSR to operate on an effective and efficient matter it is important that the internal structure is well set. Only then can we represent students. At this moment in time every FSR composes a new policy plan and "starts over". The ambition of the previous council was to make a 5-year plan on which the next councils can build on. Any initiatives that were set up will cooperate with existing facilities, forging relationships that future faculty student councils can build on.

A part of this focus point was the professionalization of the faculty student council. Internally, they made changes to the way the council approaches tasks, meetings, how we handle documents, and much more. This year's council will continue with this plan.

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2. SBE Advancement

Keywords for the SBE advancement: student wellbeing, career integration and course evaluation.

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Student wellbeing

Due to the current circumstances, most education has moved online. These changes have impacted students' personal lives, which can have an effect on their study progress. Therefore, a focus point will be the wellbeing of students. We will send out surveys and get in contact with students to find out how they are doing and will advise the faculty with recommendations for improvement based on our findings. With this pillar, we hope to achieve a feeling of connection between the students and the faculty, even remotely.

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Career integration

The bachelor programs at our faculty score pretty well on the NSE scores. However, if you look at the individual scores per topic, ‘preparing for career’ scores the lowest. There is room for improvement here. To make the studies at our faculty even better, we want to focus on integrating career aspects more into the bachelor programs. For some studies within the faculty the career integration is higher than for others. Therefore, coming year the focus will be on the studies with lower scores, to get all the programs on the same level and for longer term goal is to improve the career integration even further. We’ll look for opportunities to improve existing guest lectures and workshops. Next to that we’ll work to create more awareness about events and career opportunities that are organized outside of our faculty.

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Course evaluation

We want to motivate students to fill in course evaluation using incentives like coffee coupons, discounts for trainee courses or gift vouchers. Before we do this, we will need to contact the committee responsible for the course evaluation. After that we will contact potential collaboration parties. The benefit of this is that there will be better communication between the faculty and the students and this can lead to the improvement of the education. We will try to keep close contacts with the program committee and the collaboration parties so that the upcoming councils can build on this policy point.

 

 

3. FSR Advancement

Keywords for the FSR advancement: internationalization, visibility and guidance.

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Internationalization

With the growth of international students, we want to become a more inclusive and international faculty, where everyone feels welcome and at home. We want students to not only attend classes but also come to a place for networking and socializing. By creating a place where students from different cultures and backgrounds can integrate, we hope to create more interaction between locals and internationals. By hosting events like a “Language Café”, Dutch and international students will have the opportunity to interact more with each other.

Since the FSR represents all students of the faculty, we also want the international students to be more involved within the faculty, making decisions, and having a better understanding of the policy points on which we will focus on this year. Therefore, we aim to translate some of the university policy documents into English. Last but not least, creating a bilingual faculty is also our goal for the year. Website, canvas page of FSR and social media will be in Dutch and English.

 

Visibility

This year the FSR also has its focus on being more visible to all of the SBE students. The brand awareness of the FSR is particularly low, and our goal is to up the amount of students that know what we can mean for them. We will achieve this by doing small talks at the start of a new period and being approachable at Bachelor and Master days.

Also, we will intensify the use of our social media channels, where we will make sure that students stay up-to-date with upcoming events and how the progress on our goals is going. Depending on the success of this policy point, other projects of the (future) FSR can be positively influenced by having more input from the students.

 

SBE Guidance

With this pillar the FSR focuses on helping students find their way within the faculty. Where can they go for questions about proctored exams? Or who can help them with a personal problem? We will answer such questions and many more in our SBE guidance pillar. This year, we will create a document containing all contact information of organizations within and outside of the faculty to help students get their questions to the right people. The advantage of such a document is to prevent students from sending emails to the wrong people, before finding the right person to send it to. This will save you as a student a lot of time and effort.

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