Tell us a little bit about yourself!
My name is Haryati. I’m from Singapore. I moved to Leeds 16 years ago when my son started school. I’ve just completed my part-time Child and Family Studies degree with the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Leeds.
I’ve got a few interests, but food is definitely one of the main ones, which means I have too many cookbooks and spend quite a lot of time watching cooking shows on telly. A recent favourite is Three Meals a Day (English title), which is a Korean cooking/reality show that I binge-watched recently when I was back home.
Why did you want to join the Exec?
Honestly, I never thought about joining the Exec. And then I found out about the free food…
Seriously though, in the past, whenever I’ve tried to engage with any of the activities that take place at the Union, it’s always been a case of ‘I’ll have to leave it at that’ mostly because, as interesting as they were, I felt they missed the mark at catering to students like myself – mature students with caring responsibilities, minimal time and even less money.
Whenever the topic of LUU came up, the conversation always ended with how the Union doesn’t represent us, let’s say your ‘non-typical student’, for example, mature students and students with caring responsibilities. So, I wanted to change that, and it became clear that being an Exec is one of the best, if not the best way to implement change.
Being a student, for me, is fundamentally about overcoming barriers. This is true for many students, whether it is moving to a new city and all the challenges that come with it, being able to enrol for the modules you want, balancing personal and University commitments or any other barriers that stop you from having the best academic experience possible.
For our liberation groups and other marginalised groups, these barriers are consistent and more widespread since they’re part of broader systemic issues.
What are your priorities for the year ahead?
One of my main priorities is to make help and support more straightforward to navigate without having to trawl through websites and pages.
I feel that many of us feel reluctant to get help and support for many reasons, believing that there’s time to manage it ourselves, until we don’t.
This is when we start looking for specific help or support from the University or Union because we’ve seen or heard of it, and that’s when the whole process of finding that help/support can become demoralising and add to the stress and pain you’re already feeling.
So that’s one priority. Another priority is to provide a space for our marginalised students to meet, chat and learn from each other as part of a community. This aligns with one of the things that Natasha, the previous Equality and Liberation officer, would have liked to have done, which was to tap into the knowledge of our students through their lived experiences.
Hopefully, doing so would be a key way of getting students to be excited and to be involved in liberating LUU.
What are you most looking forward to in your role?
This may sound cliché, but I’m looking forward to making a difference in how our liberation groups experience their time at Leeds – even if the impact on an individual is a small positive one.
That’s why I’m glad that there are already people (staff and students) who are passionate about this issue and are willing to give their time, share their knowledge and lived experience to give input and support, and work with me to achieve this.
Is there a message you’d like to send to our students?
It’s difficult to just name one! I’d like to tell fellow students that sometimes, especially when things are not going as well as we expect, or everything seems to be going wrong no matter what we do, I understand that it feels easy to just give up.
I want students to know that this is common; that’s what life is about, and being at Uni magnifies this for many of us, especially when we’re already dealing with imposter syndrome. So, remember you’re not alone. Although it can be easier said than done, reach out to those around you, including LUU. Don’t just reach out for the big things – the little things matter just as much. After all, that’s what we’re here for.
Read more about the Student Exec and how they can support you here.
