Thursday 11-03-2021 - 13:42

Watching ‘It’s a Sin’ last month made memories of my time at NUS come flooding back.  I was on the NEC in 1989/90 at the height of Thatcherism, the time of student loans, AIDS, Clause 28 and yet another anti-abortion bill.  Looking back I loved my time at NUS, I learnt more in one year than I could ever have imagined and made some life-long friends.  At the time I think I spent 70% of the time terrified that I had no idea what I was doing or someone was going to ask me a question that exposed that.  I probably spent the remaining 30% of the time in The Half Moon on Holloway Road drinking enough to forget that I was terrified about the college meeting I was doing the next day. 

 

I was scared because I was being stretched, doing things I hadn’t done before and given the option would have run away from, but there was no turning back.

 

The benefit of a year that involved a lot of fear is that I’ve had a lifetime of work in which I’ve been confident that nothing awful is going to happen and that I have the resilience to deal with whatever is thrown at me.  I put this down to my sabbatical year at Thames Polytechnic and my time on the NEC.  They were like a fast track experience to running a business from managing projects, stakeholder relations, building relationships with staff and being the public face of an organisation.

 

For context when I was on the NEC there were no computers or mobile phones, I can’t imagine now how we toured colleges for speaking events with no contact back with HQ and how I got from stations to colleges without google maps.  But that experience of being alone once you left the building helped you to be more self-reliant.  I’ve thought a lot about what I got from NUS and how it’s made a difference to my career and how that is different from another job and I think it comes down to three things;

• Resilience - you had to cope, you were the leadership of the organisation so whatever was thrown at you had to be done.  There were some awful confrontational situations, especially at National Conference but you survived.
• Confidence – the sheer volume of public speaking, chairing conferences or being at meetings at which you felt like the junior partner but were meant to be in charge built a bank of confidence.  In my career I’ve just not been phased by any of these experiences yet I’ve had countless colleagues who have been a bag of nerves before something like speaking in public.
• Influencing – I learnt at NUS you get things done through your impact on people.  Whether that’s influencing public policy or the direction of an organisation relationships are everything.  One bit of advice I was given when I started at NUS was make friends with the print room and the admin team, there will be times you want your work to jump the queue you will only be able to make that happen if you are friends with people.  That has been one of the best bits of advice I ever had.

I’m now CEO of a Charity called Age Exchange and there are countless times I use skills I learnt at NUS it’s just now I enjoy the challenge of those experiences and they don’t terrify me.  I love my job and I’m so glad being on the NEC led me to it.

 

One thing I didn’t realise when I was on the NEC was that all those lovely staff at HQ were coaching and mentoring us, willing the NEC to do their best and helping us learn along the way.  They were there to catch us when it didn’t go to plan, I think I cried on a couple of them.  So a heartfelt thanks to all the NUS staff who helped generations of us to do our best and develop skills that would last us a lifetime.