Sarah sat down with the 2025 Student Representative Council President, Diya Sengupta, to discuss what what the SRC is, and her vision for the year.
Can you first explain what the SRC President does, and what contact you have with the uni?
I do a lot of things on paper. My job is to represent the students and to be the voice of the students, but what does that actually mean?
I guess I can split it up into a few categories, which is, firstly, as SRC President, I sit on multiple of the decision making boards such as the Arc board, academic board, EDI board, et cetera. Some of them have a direct route to the chancellor. Some of them have a direct route to Arc. So that basically means that I get to be the student voice on a lot of these boards that either don’t have much student representation, or to specifically be the person there whose sole job it is to advocate for the interest of students. So that’s job one.
Job two is I get an amount of budget and I manage a team of office bearers who are all doing their own projects. So it’s my job to help figure out how we can use the money to give back to the student community.
The SRC specifically, compared to things like clubs and things, is a role where we identify problems that are existing in the student community and we figure out how to solve them. So for example, last year, the women’s officer went on a campaign to get period products in all the bathrooms, because that was a problem for women on campus. And as women’s officer, it was her job to figure out what women needed on campus. So that’s job number two. Use my money.
And then job number three is just general policy making advocacy which goes hand in hand with the boards as mentioned, and also meeting directly with people in governance.
So I guess that goes to the next question of what my connection with the uni is, and the answer is, I meet with certain members of the university who are higher up, like members of the chancellery, every two months or something like that.
If there is something that is an issue, the uni and the chancellor especially works on such a long scale – I would say 10 years. So it’s more so that I can give student voice on things, but they will not realistically be materialized i the near future, unless it’s a project that we start on our end, which is why I think using our budget efficiently is such an important thing.
But at the very least it’s making sure that the political values of the students are reflected. So things like divestment really came up in a lot of the SRC last year, and taking that to the uni and management saying “look, we’ve had a lot of student feedback on the fact that we would like divestment. So how can we incorporate that into the uni’s model moving forward?”
Is that depressing to you? That you’re advocating for change that won’t occur during your presidency?
Yes, which is why I’ve decided to make sure that unlike some previous SRC presidents, I also prioritize short term projects.
Currently we’re doing a SRC clothes hub where we’re having clothing donation bins across campus. And that’s one of those things where I’m like, “okay, I can start this before O week. I can get this running week five. And then by the end of the term I’ll be like, great job. You did something, you ticked it off”.
Instead of something like semesters, which will happen way after my time at uni.
How do you market what projects the SRC is currently working on?
The answer is in short Instagram, but it’s also people, because we have so many office bearers doing so many things, and it’s up to the office bearers to post what they’re doing and then for me to recirculate that.
We also have the SRC newsletter. And also we love having a good relationship with student media. We think that what you guys do is so important of circulating back what we are doing, so that the average student knows what we’re doing and knows how to get involved.
So if people want to know more about the SRC, they should head to the Instagram?
Pretty much, that’s our primary form of contact. We also like to post stories whenever we’re doing things as well.
But also newsletters and presidential reports. In those, we’re like “here is everything that’s happened in the last few months, here is everything that’s going to happen in the next few months”.
How does one sign up to the SRC newsletter?
You automatically are enrolled if you are an Arc member.
What made you run for the role of President?
Because I was on SRC and I did not like how things were going. I felt like my big issue with SRC is that it is so politically factionalized that nothing gets done because people are more interested in making broad statements to protect their political parties, than they are to see what the average student wants.
If I wanted to do something, I would have to wait to then get a response from the president to then take that to the next board meeting and wait two months to then have something happen of it. And whenever I would try to jump the steps, I would basically be given a “hmm, we don’t want to hear from you because you’re not the president.”
So I went, “okay, what if I was the president? What if you had to hear from me?” And now I am, and I send people emails all the time being like, “you must listen to me and I want to do this thing.”
As you’ve said, the SRC is the voice of the people. How do you engage with UNSW students to get a sense of what they want, so you can then liaise with UNSW to make it happen?
Within the last five to ten years, we’ve had decreasing engagement with students. But the answer in theory is the collectives. If you join a collective, if you are part of a marginalized group, you speak in the collective space, you engage with what your office bearer is saying. And then the office bearer takes that to council. So for example, Queer collective is the most active collective. A lot of Queer students go to Queer collective meetings regularly. They go to Queer collective events regularly. If there’s an issue they go straight to the Queer officer and the Queer officer can take that to council. For example, gender neutral bathrooms have been a concern brought through the Queer collective.
Queer collective has taken that to council and that has now been escalated through actual chancellery stuff on the UNSW redevelopment. So that’s an example of how that would be done.
We also engage with things like Arc clubs. Our ethnocultural officer is doing a great job at engaging with all the cultural clubs and touching base with them regularly, seeing what their cultural communities need, and then taking in that feedback.
What’s one thing the SRC achieved last year?
Arc clubs reformatted a lot of their grievance procedures. So things like having mandatory welfare officers. That was a Diya Sengupta thing that then got escalated through Michael Rahme, that then got brought through whilst I was ethnocultural officer.
Any parting words to the people of UNSW?
In general in the past, the SRC has had an issue of people not knowing what we do and that’s because you can’t point to one thing and say “this is an SRC thing”. Even though we’ve had our fingers in a lot of pies.
I think that uni SRC needs to be more like high school SRC. I think we just need to do things to actually help students, which is at the end of the day what high school SRC was meant to be.
It’s funny because I was never a high school SRC kid. I thought it was for nerds. And here I am.