Michael is a student on the Pre Hospital and Unscheduled Emergency Care (Paramedic) course. As a professional student who spends 50% of his time in University, and 50% of his time on shift with the ambulance service, he is one of the Students’ Unions hardest to reach students.

Professional students are notoriously difficult to engage with due to their extremely intensive and busy courses, and often busy home lives to match. Michael has bucked this trend; he became a Student Academic Representative (StAR) in September 2012, quickly becoming one of the most engaged StARs this year. He attended the StARs training session at the start of the year, and was enthusiastic during Course Management Committees and subsequently became a very active member of the StARs community at VP Forums (open forums chaired by the VP Education whereby students ask the PVC Students questions around their University experience) and beyond.

It became clear that Michael was also doing fantastic work for his course colleagues. In September 2012, the Paramedic course intake doubled however, students felt that resources were not doubled in the same way. The equipment was stretched, and the student experience was affected as practice time was decreased per student. Michael was crucial to airing these concerns at course management committees and Institute level committees and as a direct result worked in partnership with the Institute to secure funding for new equipment for their course. This has dramatically improved the student experience on his course, providing more realistic practice sessions, making sure they all have adequate amounts of equipment and ensuring that the needs of the students are met.

Michael has also secured NHS lanyards for his large cohort of course colleagues as they suggested that their ID card not being displayed and easily losable was a problem when on busy shifts where being easily recognised is essential.

Michael has also arranged extra practice sessions for individuals on his course that felt that additional sessions would be beneficial to them. This includes arranging room and equipment bookings and promotion to the students. This has improved the confidence of the students who felt they needed that little bit of extra help.

As a group of students that are usually quite isolated and busy because of the arrangements for their course, Michael has brought a social element to his course by organising activities such as paintballing and bowling allowing all the students to integrate into their course and make friends to enhance their experience at the University of Worcester.

Lastly, one of the most exceptional changes Michael has made was for the safety of his whole group. As Paramedic students, they do not receive arranged flu jabs. They are in contact with patients daily and their chances of catching the flu is extremely high. Michael was able to arrange a flu jab clinic on campus for all of his course colleagues. This is such a fantastic initiative, and one that Michael was crucial to. I am extremely proud that a StAR recognised the danger of this and took time to arrange such an effective clinic for all of his course colleagues and eliminated the danger of them catching the flu.

Moreover, we encourage our Student Academic Reps to use varied communication methods when collecting feedback from their courses. Michael is on a notoriously difficult course to communicate with, with many groups in the cohort, two different years on varying shift patterns, it is very difficult to not fall into the slump of simply using email to try and gain feedback. Michael has used a wide variety of communications, attending lectures to ask for feedback, he has developed a Facebook group to share feedback, and emailed his groups and others to gain feedback, but also to inform students of what he has been doing as their StAR, which is extremely important and many StARs may not understand as well as Michael.

Michael has recently been awarded the StARs Gold Accreditation, celebrating his achievements as an ‘exceptional’ Student Academic Representative. He will also be awarded Institute of Health and Society StAR of the year at our Volunteering and Societies Awards. He is an extraordinarily active StAR who understands his role explicitly. Not only does he gather feedback about issues and positive aspects about his course colleagues’ experiences to feed into the University at various forums, he helps deliver StARs training, opts in to working groups that I create (including the Student Led Teaching Awards group) to gain views from students, he helps deliver campaigns and provides an invaluable insight into what the Students’ Union can do to improve the experience of an isolated and hard to reach group; professional placement students.

Michael’s priority is to ensure that he makes a difference to students. This is evident in his lead on a student led ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ project into how the University looks at Employability and PDP. He led a large project with four other StARs to see what the University was doing well for different demographics of students and therefore what improvements could be made and what the University should champion. They then presented their findings to a conference where Sir Robert Burgess (Vice Chancellor, University of Leicester) was guest speaker. This project was entirely led by students and could not happen without the commitment Michael had in leading this voluntary project as a StAR. The project was ground-breaking and shows just what students can do and the power that they have to influence change at their University.

Michael is the personification of ‘I am the change’. He influences change, continues to change, promotes change and most importantly – he does change, and that is why he deserves to be named ‘Course Rep of the Year’.