I'm MingYue Huang, an international postgraduate who wants to apply for the Vice President Community of QMUL.
Why you should elect me
I was a volunteer of Discovery Student Volunteering Swansea and a member of the Chinese In Wales Association for nearly two years. During this period, I attended a variety of activities such as facilitating new international students to proceed their enrollment and to integrate into campus life, running an exhibition of Chinese spring festival showing the locals more information on Chinese traditional cultures, etc.
Based on these experiences, I earned quite a bit of knowledge about the responsibilities of the Vice president communities. I can get along well with specific students and am capable of coming up with solutions regarding issues within the relative communities.
What I Can Do
During this pandemic, almost all the students are going through a hard time, especially the international students. As an international student myself, I am facing the same difficulties like the other international students do.
Provide more online activities of gather students together/Pay more attention on students’ mental health during the pandemic.
We not only struggle with keeping a good physical health condition during the time traveling to the UK, but also face the shortage on financial aspect since we pay an enormous amount of tuition fees as international students studying in the UK. Many of us need to pay all the fees involved in the nucleic acid detection required by the British government upon arrival. In addition, due to the lockdown policy, students take all the courses online. International students miss most of the opportunities to chat with the local students. They will feel much more lonely than before. Even worse, some of them who are not fluent at English will stay in their comfort zone and avoid communicating with other students who use English as their mother language. In this situation, students will suffer many mental problems.
This cannot contribute to the harmonious campus atmosphere. Miscommunication will cause a series of misunderstandings. The best way to reduce potential possibilities of such occurrences is to provide sufficient activities to enhance the connection among the students, thus allowing the students to successfully complete their degree with a wonderful memory.
Establish an equal atmosphere for specific students/Normalize specific students
Activities or lectures that are related to specific students will most likely attract specific students. I think what we can do during this time, we can set up a chatroom or something similar to a Q&A Forum by inviting all students who are interested in or curious about specific topics, and allowing them to ask all the questions that they might be confused about. Instead of establishing their own communities to distinguish their differences, we can instead lead the students to build a bridge among themselves and help them better understand each other. Specific students shouldn’t be specialized. Once we specialize them, we subconsciously differ ourselves from them through a barrier. Ultimately, we are all human beings. Being part of a minority in the society is not what they aim for but exactly who they are. Will you discriminate someone who do not produce the same fruit as you do? The answer is definitely no. Therefore as for me, the best way to eliminate discrimination is to stop specializing the differences and to start respecting them all equally.