Linz Mincher is one of five candidates running for Vice President of Education in this year’s Student Union Elections. She has strategized a manifesto focused on helping current and future students of the university with their educational needs.
The VP Education’s job is to represent the academic interests of students and to oversee the academic representative structure of the union.
Linz sat down with Brig to tell us a bit about her candidacy.
Experience
Linz has been at Stirling University for five years. She completed her undergraduate degree last June and is currently sitting her masters. During that time, she feels as though the experience she has gathered will benefit her in this union role.
“I’m the faculty officer for the natural sciences for the Masters taught, I’m a student peer mentor, and I’m an academic rep for my course,” Linz said.
“This is my fifth consecutive year in Stirling, so I’ve already got quite a good relationship with the Union, with the Careers and Employability [team], [and] with the Student Learning Services.”
Linz spoke a bit about her current role as a faculty officer. She mentioned that she has already started doing some work to improve education.
“I’m already trying to raise issues regarding timetabling and in-person lectures,” she said.
As an academic rep, Linz has managed to raise issues students had within her current psychology course.
“We’ve managed to get trigger warnings on our lecture content, because they weren’t [including it], and quite a lot of the content [can be] triggering,” Linz said, “I’ve got a quite a lot of experience already representing students’ views.”
Why did you decide to run?
“I’d love to represent more people,” Linz told Brig.
She explains how important students’ views and voices are to her, telling Brig that she doesn’t have an issue “speaking up” and isn’t “one to back down”.
“I’m really passionate about it and I enjoy doing it,” Linz said.
What main goals do you have?
“For one, I want to build a stronger relationship between the union and the uni. I know that the RAAC has made it quite difficult, but I would like to build on that relationship. I feel like it would really be in the students’ best interest,” Linz said.
“I’d [also] like to have complaint boxes [around campus] because I know that not everybody likes to speak up. I feel like having the complaints box, anonymous, anyone can put anything in,” she said.
Timetabling is another big issue for Linz, and she wants to resolve the amount of issues that students are having. She also explains how she wants to make in-person lectures and course content more engaging for students, so they can get the most out of their time at university.
Linz said that her manifesto was inspired by things she has noticed around the university in the last five years, things that could be improved or changed to benefit students.
“I started in 2019 and I got to see a little bit of the uni before [Covid], and I sometimes wonder how we haven’t managed to get back to that – to an extent,” she said.
What would you like to do most for students?
“I feel like above anything, the content, I think, is the most important on the education side. People are spending a lot of money to be here, they want to be able to finish their degree and feel like they have achieved it, that they’re getting the best use of their applications,” she said.
“I’d love to achieve everything [from my manifesto], that is my main goal, and being able to let students know that they’re being represented fairly, and that they are feeling like they’re being heard.”
Voting opens on Tuesday, February 27 at 10am.
Featured Image Credit: Stirling Students Union
Fourth year student journalist studying Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Journalism Studies.
Words at Brig, The Daily Evergreen, Alloa Advertiser, Discovery Music Scotland, and The Mourning Paper.
