Course Rep Meetings – Frequently Asked Questions

For your departmental meetings, your invitations will come via email from a member of staff within your department. This will often be your Programme Administrator. If you are a PGR, your invitations will come from the PGR Chair of your Engagement Forum in your Faculty.

For Students’ Union meetings, we will send you an email invitation.

You will need to send through your apologies for absence as soon as you know that you cannot attend a meeting, and these apologies will need to be sent to whoever sent you your invitation to the relevant meeting.

Your meetings may well be online, but if they are in person, and you are a distance learner, out on placement, or have another physical barrier to attending meetings on campus, you could request to use Microsoft Teams to join your departmental meetings, or you may wish to send your apologies for all meetings at the start of the year.

Yes, absolutely! We encourage that any Rep who cannot attend a meeting submits a written report to be presented in their absence. This ensures that the students you represent are still heard. Collate the feedback you’ve gathered, anonymise it, and turn it into a written report that you send through to the meeting organiser along with your apologies for absence.

If you are a distance learner, or out on placement, we would expect you to submit a written report to all meetings as you would not be expected to attend in person.

Yes, attending the meetings listed above are compulsory in order to fulfil your Rep role, and for UG/PGT Reps, essential to meet the criteria for your HEAR eligibility. This is why sending in your apologies for absence and a written report are vital.

Ensure that you’ve been in touch with your peers to gather their feedback, their academic experiences, and life at Surrey in general. Anonymise any feedback you’ve received, and collate this into some notes/a report that you can take with you to the meeting. Get in touch with any other Reps in your department to ensure that you’re not going to repeat or miss any information.

You’ll be asked to share the feedback you’ve gathered, so be prepared to explain what your feedback is and what it shows. Be sure to always present feedback in a professional way – be accurate, balanced, constructive, and keep your feedback factual and not personal. You must remember that communicating with staff in a professional way will earn you respect and ensure that staff feel they can work with you to find a solution.

Before any meeting, you should make sure you have feedback to discuss, and if you are a UG/PGT Rep, that you have checked your MySurrey Voice Unitu board for any feedback that hasn’t been completed.