The University of Surrey Students’ Union are committed to understanding the lives of our students and their experiences at university. In order to do this, we are proud members of the Student Life Pulse, an online survey specially developed for student unions in the UK.
About Pulse
The survey will track the experience of our students at Surrey throughout the academic year, as well as your perceptions and experiences of the U​nion itself. We’ll use the information collected to develop and plan our services for the future and act as your voice.
Between October and June you will receive an email inviting you to take part by completing the online survey. We want to hear the views of as many of our students as possible, so we hope you can spare a few minutes to help us with this important research! You will also be entered into a prize draw for your participation.
The research is being administered by Alterline, an independent research agency. Alterline is an accredited research company which follows all guidelines for data privacy and security. It only has enough information about you to conduct the research and it will not keep any of your personal information after the research is finished.
Any information you disclose will be treated in the strictest confidence and the results are anonymised so no answers are attributable to any individuals.
Our Plan for 2023/24
We run the Student Life Pulse survey every year, and based on the responses you gave us last year, we’ve been working on our plan for this year to address your feedback.
What will we be doing this year?
This year, based on the feedback you gave us through Pulse, we have identified 5 areas for specific focus.
1. Making you more employable
We know how important your future is to you. We will be continuing the Employable Me scheme this year, and are making the effort to work with all our student volunteers and employees to show you how to communicate the skills you’ve developed to employers or placement providers. We will also be offering more employability and development sessions to our volunteers and student leaders, and employing more student staff within the Union.
2. Positively impacting your wellbeing
This year, we are focusing on helping you positively building up your resilience and wellbeing. We are also continuing some key initiatives to help you connect with new friends, to help you feel safe on campus, and to ensure that you have the best options for peer support. We also want to help make the Extenuating Circumstances process easier, and are developing our Wellbeing Champions and our peer support services to cover more topics that might benefit your wellbeing.
3. Ensuring you can influence the decisions we make
We will run Speak Week to ask you to tell us what you want to see changed at Surrey, and we’ll use this information and the insight we gather from you in our research including Pulse to set our priorities for the year. During SurreyDecides, we’ll be encouraging you to get involved in running for election and voting, so that you have the opportunity to have your say. Your Zones will be working on making it clear to you how you can share your ideas with them too.
4. Making sure our communications are relevant to you
We’ve been working on streamlining our communications, and this year, we’ll be looking at the content you receive and the channels we use to make sure that you receive clear communications from us. We are also working more closely with the University communications team this year to give our initiatives a strong presence.
5. Effectively Representing your Academic Interests
We know your studies or research are vitally important to you, so they’re therefore vitally important to us. We will be improving our academic representation scheme through the development of Head Reps, and by meeting with specific groups who would like to see the Union do more for them to get a better understanding of what matters most. We’ll also be working alongside the University on key projects and issues such as assessment and feedback, AI within education, and supporting your continuation and attainment on your course.
