This year we want to work on improving the wellbeing of the students of our faculty by improving their education and improving their mental health. We want the students to feel better within our faculty, we want them to feel like our faculty is student-oriented, while also keeping in mind the diligence of the staff of our faculty.

Education & Transparency

This year we would like to further the improvement of the course feedback process. We believe that course feedback is essential and should be further addressed by the faculty council. We see a difference between the importance of course feedback between the different studies in our faculty. We want to compare these differences and try to learn what works and what doesn’t work. For example, some teachers promote the course feedback during lecture breaks and go above and beyond to improve their course. We want to discuss the course feedback with the Faculty Council to see what can be done to improve on the one side the percentage of students who fill out the course evaluations and on the other side what teachers do with this information. We also believe that there should be more transparency about what has been done with the course feedback. Over the last few years, this has been a topic at our faculty and we see that the teachers and staff have worked to improve this. However, we still see that within some courses this could be improved. We believe that by improving this process, the education at our faculty will be even better than it is now, and our students will feel like they are being heard by the staff. This could contribute to students feeling more motivated to fill out the evaluation forms.

Mental Health

Mental health significantly impacts students' overall well-being and academic success. High levels of stress, anxiety, or depression can hinder their ability to concentrate, learn effectively, and engage in social activities. Therefore, we feel like mental health is a really important topic. Mental health has been an important topic within our university for the last years and we feel like the Faculty has improved a lot. For example, the faculty offers different workshops and resources for students regarding mental health. However, according to the ‘Monitor Mentale gezondheid en Middelengebruik Studenten hoger onderwijs 2023’ from the RIVM, a considerable amount of students still struggle with their mental health. Therefore,  we want to make more improvements and keep working on this topic. Firstly, we will add an additional member of our party to the Mental Health Working Group of our faculty. This way, mental health will be a regular topic for us. We already had one member in the working group, who worked with the working group to organize “Tea with a stranger” and make an infographic about where students can go with their problems. Furthermore, we want to improve the way students are being informed about the available resources further and we want to make sure that these resources are available for every student, for example by making sure all the resources are available in English as well as in Dutch. By working together with the Faculty Council and the Mental Health Working Group we hope that we can play a role in improving the way the faculty handles the Mental Health of our students.