By Janice Yane,Vice-Chair Penrith Student Campus Council:
Aside from the obvious benefits of attending the Education Conference by National Union of Students (NUS) and listening to the respected guest speakers during multiple workshops and seminars, I’ll admit that my favourite thing about my student life transformation from earlier this year is, without a doubt, my newfound interest in politics.
The closer I come to the EdCon 2016, the more eagerly I expected being one of the six delegates sent by Western Sydney University.
I spent four hours on transportation each day of the conference because there was only one Penrith campus shuttle bus in service during the winter break. As I am living on campus, I committed myself to getting out of my warm bed by 6:30 am and travelling to the city. I walked a long way from Redfern railway station across the University of Sydney campus to the auditorium in Eastern Avenue theatre complex.
I write this three weeks after the education conference (it was held July 4-7). I recall the most impressive message was from the panel of journalists who shared their knowledge and experience and gave genuine opinions about the media industry.
It was my third time watching the movie Hunting Ground. The theme of the movie is sexual assault of female students in American university campuses. The aim of the screening at the conference was to raise awareness of violence against women to prevent it happening in Australia.
During the conference, while some students yelled at each other across the auditorium where I had been spending a large portion of my three days, overall it was quite friendly. Some student representatives invited me to add them via social media, and soon we were connecting with one another on Facebook. Social media provides the platform that has been a really fun way of making new friends and learning more about different cultures, sharing photographs and video clips.
What really surprised me was how popular political culture is in the other universities. Every second participant I met belonged to political parties and almost everyone was aware of politics. I came across at least 20 students from different universities. They seem to have been trained with political knowledge there. It was cool to see their excited reactions to political and university policies and their arguments or criticism of others from different political parties. Some students held strong appeal in their expression of outrage over cuts to education funding. Compared to university students in some parts of Asia, the students of this exciting city and country are lucky to be able to enjoy freedom of speech, assembly, expression and information.
I am organizing an assembly at 11 am on Kingswood campus to join forces with the student protest by NUS in the city on Wednesday Aug 24.
More details about the rally at https://www.facebook.com/events/337028709971850/
Feel free to like Penrith Student Campus Council’s Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/penrithscc/
If you are from other WSU campuses, please like our page at https://www.facebook.com/westernsrc.org or visit our website at www.westernsrc.org
Janice Yane, Vice-Chair Penrith Student Campus Council
