Sunday 1st March - Hustings, hustings and yet more hustings!

Today saw the busiest day of the campaign in terms of hustings with 5 in a single day, but it also saw us crash through the half-way point of this hustings schedule!
It started with our first lunch-time slot, at Jesus College - questions were raised about our recent Access involvement and how we propose to increase media interest in Access initiatives.

After lunch in carvery, I was off up to Churchill for radio hustings on CUR1350 - Despite having a microphone right in front of me, I actually found it not too bad - questions were submitted live during the show and we talked about students from ethnic being under-represented and how we plan to tackle this, along with a question about the purpose of CUSU open days. (If anyone wants to hear extracts from it - it should be on the CUR1350 website in the next couple of days)

With not much of a break inbetween, the next stop was Newnham (via putting a poster up at Gardies - never imagined I'd be doing that!). Questions were asked on how we would increase funding for Access and a question about international students and whether we should be encouraging them to apply.

Next stop - Homerton (via a mini-bus) - this took place in the bar and so we had some enthusastic football fans, who were obviously cheering for the candidates at various intervals (or it might have been when a goal was scored - not really sure which!) This was home turf for a number of the candidates, and so the turn-out was slightly bigger than the previous hustings - HE Funding entered the arena of discussion once more, as did what we would do in our first few months in the job, as well as a question about whether we need an Access Sabb not that applications are higher (complete with a certain CUSU President forgetting to give me my time to answer - which ended up with me getting my words into a nice game of twister!)

Final stop on the Sunday was the other side of Cambridge - Girton (via Co-Op for some of the hungry candidates!) - rumours of random questions to do with what sandwich or fruit we would be and why were proved to be unfounded - instead we had a question about whether Access is actually what CUSU should be doing, because arguably it doesn't affect current students directly.

Turn-out wasn't great today for a number of the hustings - will be interesting if we see more students tomorrow at Murray Edwards, Fitz, Clare or Caius.

As for me - I have a supervision in 9 hours - oh the joy - I'd sort of forgotten what law work was like!