Cardiff Pulse: Why you need to start using your student voice

Written by Student Champions Jade Tucker and Sara Williams

Let’s be honest, these last few years hasn’t been particularly brilliant for communication between us students and the university. Email chains, meetings and zoom calls, often held with good intentions of easing our frustrations, have often times resulted in the complete opposite effect – leaving us more frustrated, more angry, and more confused. So, it goes without saying that student feedback and communication with the university is more important now than ever. The university knows this, hence, with the launch of Cardiff Pulse again this March they hope to start changing things.

But I get it, it seems like every semester there is a new form, new survey, new set of questions – all about our thoughts about our time at the university, yet often no matter how many we fill out our feedback feels like it just goes into the void to forgotten about, what makes this Cardiff Pulse any different?

But what exactly is the Cardiff Pulse ?

Well, as insignificant as it might seem on an individual scale for us as students, Cardiff Pulse has great potential as a student voice mechanism to bring great change to how things are run here – it is this feedback after all which is used to make key changes not only at school level but at greater university level! However, only 7% of students (2068) even responded to the one in June 2021. So, when we ask ourselves “why doesn’t the university listen to us?” we really have to ask ourselves “why aren’t we using our voice?” With only 7% of students standing for our student voice, how can we ever expect anything to change?

It’s essentially a platform for us to actively voice our comments, or to share any concerns we have with our school to create a positive change at the University. Everyone across the University can fill in Cardiff Pulse so they can see if the changes they’ve made have had any impact from previous years, as well as helping them find out what they can do to support us better. The University invites us to talk about how we’re getting on relating to our university life and helps the University to shape our academic and support services to meet our needs and interests.

Got any comments about the pandemic, online teaching or anything that’s relevant to you and what you’re passionate about.

This March 21 – 28 is the final Cardiff Pulse of this academic year, let’s make it count! Complete Cardiff Pulse

After you’ve completed the survey.

Our feedback is essential to the University. Keep an eye out on https://intranet.cardiff.ac.uk/students/student-voice/student-surveys/cardiff-pulse-student-survey/your-feedback to hear the University’s response, and how they’ll be using our feedback to make a real change.