International Students’ Off icer Report
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Nayonika Bhattacharya
INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ OFFICER REPORT By Nayonika Bhattacharya (on behalf of Tanmay Manchanda)
The International Collective had an off icer at the start of the year, then they resigned. Then a second off icer was supposed to come in, but then they didn’t come in. And then I think eventually, towards mid-year, we had the off icer (Tanmay Manchanda) come in. The International Collective did take a bit of a tumble and a toss, because of how many off icers changed. As last year’s International Off icer, it was a bit of a baby for me, and the people I’ve met through it are amazing. So I wanted to make sure that I could keep it on. So I was sort of managing the Welfare Collective and the International Collective for a bit. But then, so basically what the international collective has gone through so been a lot of events for the International collective through the International Student Experience unit, Kingsford Legal Centre and Arc Legal. I organised a bunch of events revolving around tenancy agreements, tenancy rights, working rights and things like that. So events involving the Fair Work Ombudsman, and things around workplace safety and harassment. We’ve been pushing for employability and putting yourself out there as an international student, getting your f irst work experiences, and how to seek placement or internships if that’s necessary for your degree. We’ve worked with Student Job Australia and the Council of International Students Australia (CISA) to push for that. We’ve pushed for concessions in terms of f inancial assistance. In my capacity as an international student, we pushed for that and Study NSW came through with that. We had agreements with homestay networks, and a lot of other community organisations. We had a lot of conversations with embassies on how they could assist students. We set up a lot of support groups for students f rom different regions and their embassies, as well as community organisations and support networks here. For instance, if you are a Malaysian student, we set up communication between the Malaysian Students Organisation and Malaysian organisations in Sydney. And then we tried to organise a number of online events for people catch up. So we set up a lot of catch-up, games night events, movie nights and things like that, so that students that were still here, had a way to be connected. Violence
We set up internal conversations amongst student society executives, so they could chat about who the students were staying back were, how they put support them and how we could support student societies through the pandemic as well. So whatever they were organising, we could reach out to international students to have a chat with them as well. And then we did a lot of work with the International Experience Unit. And we kept in touch with all of the students who were enrolled, but were overseas. So we’d organise events with them and cultural mentors, and run online events every fortnight so people knew what was going on.
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