Khushhali Gupta is a postgraduate sports psychology student running for Vice President Communities. If she is elected, she wants to build on her previous work as Arts Officer, making Stirling University a “thriving, inclusive, and well-connected space”.
Gupta’s manifesto primarily focuses on strengthening student engagement with societies, tackling the student housing crisis, and working to improve sustainability on campus.
Why is sustainability important to you as VP Communities?
“Sustainability is not just a goal that we should be achieving as a university – it should be everybody’s responsibility in their day-to-day lives. I have seen certain events and projects that happen on campus that could do with integrating a lot more sustainability, and this could have long term impacts.
“One way I want to do this is to create a sustainability grant for societies where if, whatever project they come up with, has a sustainable impact on campus, they get an additional grant towards it. So it’s kind of like an incentive.”
How do you plan on encouraging students to use more sustainable forms of transport like walking or cycling?
“Firstly, I want to tackle the issue of parking spaces at Stirling. If you were to live somewhere in Bridge of Allan, which is a walkable distance, then you don’t need to bring a car and you’re causing problems for people who have come from far away by taking up a parking spot.
“Secondly, and because this encourages sustainability, it saves students a lot of day-to-day costs just to walk. The living cost is a big issue for students right now and this is a small thing that could help students bring down their daily costs.
“Thirdly, the Santander bikes on campus are free for students for the first 30 minutes, which is an incentive to use them. I want to increase bike usage by making them more available. Right now I’m seeing a shortage of bikes and I want to create more Santander bike stations around campus.”
As head of VP communities how will you help drive society engagement and help society leaders?
“Even as arts officer, I saw that a lot of societies were facing issues with engagement from students, especially postgrads. One of my plans to drive engagement is to hold a ‘Society Spotlight’ week, which would be letting particular societies take over the Stirling social media for a week so that they can get the engagement they need.”
You mention creating a ‘society resource bank’ in your manifesto – could you elaborate on that?
“What I’ve noticed is that societies, in terms of shared resources, only share technical equipment like speakers, mics, music systems and all that stuff. But I want to make it so that societies can share everything from art supplies, to banners, to canvases, tables, chairs, anything they need. This promotes sustainability and improves society collaboration.”
Any closing comments?
“I think that other candidates focus too much on the big battles but miss out on smaller day-to-day battles faced by students. I want to help students by bringing an instant change to their lives.”
Student journalist with a passion for music.
