WSU State of the Union 2024 by Nexus Magazine

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WAIKATO STUDENTS’ UNION INCORPORATED

Nickname: Sni the spontaneous Shopper

Most likely to:

Spend money on random stuff - if it’s interesting they’re going in my cart

Achievement:

Still Surviving nursing school with 500+ hours of placement with nothing but sheer determination, a lot of coffee and my phone for motivation.

Best Memory:

Getting call from Dave that I was selected to join the 2024 WSU board. It was a moment of excitement and pride!

Nickname: Yesssirr

Most likely to: leave everything till last minute but still get it done on time.

Achievement: Not burning out even though I had a million things on my plate

Best Memory: Attending leadership forums in Sydney & Wellington.

Nickname: Mussy

Most likely to: Google “best most likely too answers”

Achievement: Refining my definition of leadership

Best Memory: Not being born in Luton

experience

In 2024 the WSU focused on doing more, better. Weekly activations like Pancakes at the Pā, Tuesday’s Talking Points BBQ, Union @ The SUB and the Tauranga Union pop up meant that if it was free food this year it was probably us. The big events didn’t disappear though. This year the WSU assisted more than 60 activations for our rōpū or tauira. And that doesn’t even include the iconic ones like the Tauranga Ball, Comedy Evenings or our gaming inspired Re-O’week complete with a Night Market and Deadpool Marathon. Even after all that you told us you want more next year so we will give it to you… we don’t know how, but we will!

Tauranga

This year, the Tauranga camps continued to thrive, thanks to Logan and Lani leading the charge. With two jam-packed orientation weeks, more club events, Good Neighbour, weekly BBQs and the Union at the Don pop ups. We’ve kept things lively with quiz nights, parties at the Astrolabe, and rides into town. Plus, we gave away tons of prizes during Orientation weeks, including multiple e-scooters. The shining star of course being the Out Of This World Ball. One of our iconic events that drew over 150 students. We've also seen a surge in club activity, with around 11 active clubs now running. Thanks to the University, the Campus Clubhouse has opened, offering a great hangout space with a basketball court, pool table, and table tennis.

When it comes to Student Advocacy and Student Voice we are nailing it. Our class rep trainings have been consistent, smooth and without incident. Our student support team has not only thrived but worked through major changes with our friend and brother Sterling leaving the role of Support Manager to be closer to family while Meighan Hay made a surprise return five years after she first left, to take over as his replacement. While the people may change what won’t is the unwavering commitment of our support and voice team to be there for you at times when you need them. Supporting students is literally what the whole organisation is built on. That said, we really do need better appointment tools and a video resource library next year. We’ve got this.

support support

If you haven’t been part of a club or rōpū Māori this year then STOP READING. If you are still here then we need to talk. Somehow, we had a strong year this year. A genuinely phenomenal year for some and by the ReOrientation we pulled together to create the best clubs day in a long time. We all deserve our flowers.

But if we are all honest with each other our report card would be like most kids year 10 English class “WSU Clubs and Services has real potential but needs to apply itself more.” That is on all of us. So next year we want your language weeks, we want your anniversaries. We want to celebrate with you at the Don and stand with you at your AGM’s. We are going to make 2025 a year if student engagement. Our promise to you is that if you are doing something we want to be doing it with you. But seriously ’24 was a good year but ’25 will be one people tell stories about.

Ropu Maori

E ngā rōpū māori ki te Whare Wananga o Waikato, tino pai rawa atu ō koutou mahi I tenei tau. This tone that the rōpū māori set for themselves was to reset, revive, and rekindle and you hit all three. Many of you simplified how you can be better by doing more and continued to do so and made it better for everybody. You brought back Te Ranga Ngakū and strengthened our relationship with Te Mana Ākonga. You also pushed the boundaries of what we can do at Waikato and challenged the status quo every other week. But most of all, you proved that no matter the distance, when you put your mind to it you can get it done. Nothing limits you and what you did this year proves it. Great work. Can we get some more Te Mākete food please?

Let’s be real, social media is how most of us stay in touch these days. So, this year we decided to shake things up and move away from our usual yellow and black posts. Instead, we went for something a bit different to really grab your attention. Enter the frogs in our O’week posts, the comic book-style Re’O branding, and those quirky yet surprisingly effective videos. This approach led to a record number of survey responses—some of you even mentioned you participated just because the videos were funny. We gave away a ton of prizes on our socials. turns out, literally everyone wants a PS5. Our latest creation, KATO, is a bit more formal but still just as quirky as Nexus. It’s like the sophisticated cousin who still knows how to have fun. We created KATO to bring you all the WSU updates, but keep the engaging, student-focused content you can’t get enough of.

So maybe Nexus wasn’t what you expected it to be this year. We switched to fortnightly printing, talked about lizards (they are everywhere), and overall found this year to be one of discovery and change. With a team mostly consisting of brand-new writers, we’ve certainly had our ups and downs throughout 2024 (the ups being everything, and the downs being any criticism because shhh). However, through this journey we’ve created a vision for Nexus that we are committed to see through for many years to come. We’ve had incredible fun this year, and this team of writers and designers has done an outstanding job in creating a magazine for the students, by the students.

Thank you to all the Nexus staff as well as all those who contributed this year. You guys are the best <3

NEXUS

the don union at

What you wanted was a student bar to rival the Outback or Last Place. A modern student bar with DJ’s, live acts and cheap drinks. What we got was a Sports Club with carpet from the 1970s and fake plastic trees and semi-consistent plumbing that we could use to sell burgers, pizza… and cheap drinks.

And you know what? We all made it work. You showed up in 2024, whether it was O’Week, karaoke, or Kae’sharns semirambling improv quiz nights you made

Union at the Don yours. Then you did something unexpected and bought friends for paint and vine nights, private bookings, 21st’s, match days and weirdly first birthdays (seriously three different FIRST birthdays! Be better!). Halfway through the year we rebranded and we hired a phenomenal head chief who is determined to get redemption in the 2025 Hot AF Wings Challenge. This year was growth and consolidation, 2025 is about expansion and surprise.

THE 2025 WSU ANNUAL PLAN IS

THE 2025 WSU ANNUAL PLAN

upport

1. You told us in this year’s survey that you wanted more help with day-to-day things so we will look at existing resource kits like C.A.B and build a video and resource library with everything from tenancy guides to recipes as well as creating a freshers support guide to Hamilton for our orientation bags.

2. We will review the delivery of our student support, advocacy and class reps programmes and enhance their capacity and capability with new roles such as the pokokere Māori role to provide student and organisation support. Then we will empower those support staff with better tools including our new student support database to keep track of cases, trends, and hardship grants and regularly update you.

XpEriEN C E

1. In this year’s survey you told us that you wanted to see more activity on campus in 2025. We do too! So our experience team will be tasked with making sure every day there is something for you. More BBQs, but also more activations, more commercial partners on campus, more giveaways, more music. And not just on the green or during the day. We will start to activate Hamilton and Tauranga campuses more in the Pā, the atea, the basement and the performing arts centre. Just like you, we want more quiz nights, more paint and wines, more comedy evenings, movies, bands, and night markets but we also know some lunchtimes you just want a quiet place to come and play `Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat. We think we can do it all and we hope you are excited.

We haven’t quite got to the full-time student bar and night club you wanted in the survey yet but for now at least we have Union at the Don.

The biggest change we are making in 2025 will be the extension of union as a brand for the WSU. This year we focused Trimester

A at Union at the Don, by Trimester B we were confident enough to expand to union pop ups one day a week in the sub and in Tauranga. Next year we want to open union kitchen in the basement five days a week with an exciting new soups, salads, and sandwiches menu at student prices. We will also investigate opening union online as a shop for you to buy WSU, Nexus and Union merchandise while providing our clubs and rōpū Māori a one stop shop for their own merchandise and printing needs with our production partners.

EprESENtAtIoN

1. The WSU is committed to representation that works for everyone and it is time we took a look in the mirror and evaluated what that means. We started the work in 2024 with representation models and we want to continue to consider how best to represent you. This will include:

1. Deciding on a model for more student meetings

2. Figuring out election terms and board roles

3. An audit of our participation in external organisations like NZUSA, TMA, and SJS to ensure your voices are heard.

4. Reforming structures like the student advisory council to get meaningful feedback

New resources and tools are great but in the aged words of our grey-haired General Manager “nothing is better than talking to a human” so we are going to try and do more of that.

Specifically: director drop in sessions five days a week, talking points, Director led peer support, director Instagram takeovers, live, regular governance training, streaming of teams board meetings and a report hub where you can read and search the reports from your elected representatives next to the board minutes.

PLAN IS NO LONGER A SECRET

PLAN IS NO LONGER A SECrEt

lubS AND rŌpŪ MĀorI

1. We want to give our rōpū better chances to succeed and thrive because we recognise how important they are to the overall student experience. To make this happen we will spend 2025 developing better resources and documentation for our clubs from clubs only bbqs to book, through to resource guides and trainings on constitutions, meetings, and financial management.

We will also work with clubs to form new structures to support them this will include pacific and international club forums that could help create joint activations and calendars for those larger demographics. One resource we are particularly excited about is our new “on the green grant” which will be a one-time activation grant for clubs who want to do public, open activations on campus to support language weeks, anniversaries, or even pi day.

2. The WSU is committed to its network of clubs and rōpū Māori and now we are going to be empowered by the tools to take things to the next level. Starting with contracting people to build us new club database tools and resources in SharePoint to go with our new clubs.wsu.org.nz email addresses. These tools will include shared display calendars for clubs and public display, easier affiliation and re-affiliation, video and image archives and more.

If you are reading this Annual Plan in the order we put it in then you will know that we undertook and delivered a successful IT change away from the University and to be standalone with Microsoft. The next step is to rebuild tools in a way that makes sense for our campus including the Support and Clubs database but also:

• A website that brings together all these new tools allowing you to do things that just make sense like login and upload photos of your club events to your clubs page, easier processes to make appointments with advocates and more.

Self-service stand-alone kiosks in Tauranga and the Pā to allow you to quickly get information about the WSU.

• A massive exterior digital notice board with messages, weekly calendars, club events and… lets face it… adverts for companies that will help us pay for a massive exterior digital notice board

2. Nexus needs new voices, more platforms, and better ways to engage in 2025.

To be a true reflection of the student campus Nexus

needs to diversify its audience, its contributors, and its medium. Nexus is planning its biggest refresh in the last five years. Modernising favourites like Blind Date, Waikat’ Flats, and Party reviews to be video experiences. While putting more giveaways and student generated content into the magazine.

We will also be creating new online spaces for any student (within some guidelines) to have regular subscribed columns on our website while appointing Deputy Editors for Māori content, Podcasts, and Video who on top of their writing and organising content will be passionate about key areas such as Māori content creation, video production, and podcasts. It is in that podcast space where we will launch our new 15 minute pods focused on student life, Hauora, the LGBTTIQA+ community, Accessibility, International students and anything else you want to pitch.

1. The three consistent things we learned about the Tauranga campus from our Survey are:

Everyone hates the parking You want more clubs

• You want more food options

Well starting in 2025 we will do the work to bring you more clubs and bring in more pop up Union Experiences. As well as continuing with good neighbour. As for parking…sorry.

The WSU has long maintained that if there was space for us we would activate Tauranga… Well, in 2025 the campus is opening up more and more space so we can start to create activations just for Tauranga as well as creating our first ever Tauranga centric digital Nexus.

It would be an understatement to say that the first person who needed to be thanked not just for the State of the Union (both the document and what it embodies) is our General Manager Dave West. Dave’s leadership and perseverance were instrumental in steadying the ship in 2024 after a tumultuous and fractured end to the previous year. The gratitude extends to the 2024 board of directors who endured a rough start to the year only to take an active role in making decisions that were right for the organisation and our students.

THANK YOU

We would sincerely like to thank the staff, many of whom do their work without seeking recognition or the spotlight (the others are named Jasmine and Kae’sharn). So in no particular order, thank you to:

The Venues and Experience Team: Tayladee, Amber, Mila, Christian.

The Don Team: Suneha, Kiri, Jaish, Jacko, Dante, Udara, Jade, Monique, Jose, Azariah.

The Support and Voice Team: Meighan, Sage and Sara

The Comms and Engagement Team Stien, Lara, Aria, Filly, Jasmine, Kae’sharn and Cara.

Tauranga Lani and Logan

Nexus Tehana, Lucy, Hawiera, Leilani, and Steve

And Bobby the accounts person without whom no one else would show up to work.

We also want to acknowledge our friends Sterling and Hoata who left through this year after multiple years of service.

And a number of University staff including but not limited to Neil, Alister, Henare, Mark (Astroturf the Green), Fizz, Bexs, Stacy, Victoria, and the Kahurangi staff, literally everyone from grounds and security, Candra, Suzy, Jeremy, Whets, Dakota, Penfold, Felicia, Migration Max, Rachel, Alison, Tina, Oli, Andrew, Camille, TJ, Fui, Rod, Leigh, Biana, Lynda, Dorothy, Sue and John, Swney, Micheala, Jeff, Dave Hills, Cory, Mikaela, Courtney, Claire and Nic, Max and little unborn WSU Clubs and Services Awards. We would have thanked Penengaru but like a Roller Coaster there is a height minimum to gratitude.

And finally thanks to Shaun and Gru (Brett) whose friendship, leadership and dedication are the most important components of our day to day working relationship with the Waikato Students’ Union.

PS. As with most years thanks to Salient Magazine in Wellington for lowering the standard of what we do to essentially that of fingerpainting. You keep making us great!

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