FHML 2020/2021

The candidate you elected as your councillor
for the academic year 2020-2021: Ena Skrijelij


Meet NovUM’s candidates for the FHML Council
and read what they stand for!

Manifesto 2020 

Dear fellow FHML students,

We are very happy that this year many NovUM candidates are running for the FHML Faculty Council elections. Over the past years, NovUM has done a lot to represent the voice of the students. That the voice of the students is important has especially become clear during the challenges we faced during this academic year. First, we were hit by the cyberattack and after we were slightly losing the traces of this attack, COVID-19 hit the university in its heart again. In order to cure the heart, we’ll do our utmost best to give life to the university again. 

We, as NovUM, stand for the four pillars: quality, accessibility, sustainability and integration. 

Quality

NovUM values the quality of education. We aim to improve educational quality by having more qualified tutors who are specialized in the whole content of the course and who also follow mandatory trainings before and during the course, given by the course coordinator. We often see that the quality of the education and eventually the student’s results are sometimes dependent on the qualification of the teacher. Equality in education is very important, so this should not happen anymore! We also want to improve the practical educational sessions by making them more interactive, using smaller groups and enough guidance during the sessions. 

At FHML, having the lectures recorded is already a great achievement. However, many students encounter the problem that when looking the lecture at home, you can not see the pointer of the lecturer. This make it for some study disciplines hard to follow what is being explained and we aim therefore to have the pointer visible in the lecture recordings. Besides this, the grading system which is used at FHML (fail/pass/good instead of a grade) is something we would like to change. Grading students according to a numerical scale gives opportunities to excel and because of the familiarity of other institutions with this grading system, makes it easier to study abroad. Also, some students at FHML including Health Sciences, European Public Health and Biomedical Sciences unfortunately have no access to practice exams. We believe that this is important to prepare students for their exams. 

Accessibility

At FHML we can see that students are really struggling with finding study places, especially during the exam week. The students have also problems with getting access to E-books, simply because FHML doesn’t offer a lot. We therefore want to implement more study places and extend library hours to tackle this problem. We also want to offer more E-books, so that students can also study at home without coming to the university in order to access the book. Furthermore, we see that the internship opportunities and minor opportunities abroad and within the faculty are really limited. We want to overcome this problem and want to offer more diverse minors and internships. Moreover, we think that we should make more extracurricular activities accessible for students in order to stimulate the self-development. 

Sustainability

NovUM was the first representation party to put sustainability into its core pillars. We truly value and care for the sustainability and we have therefore nice ideas to implement. We think it is of importance to offer more E-books. By implementing E-books, we reduce the use of paper. We also think that the Faculty has to radiate a warm feeling for the students by having more green/plants in the building. Furthermore, we want to implement more educational programmes in sustainability. Since there is already less variety in the minors, we can make this happen with the minor programmes. 

Integration

We want to prepare the students of FHML for the clinical field by offering more diversity in patients during the SPC’s. We think this is important because it represents the patients the future professionals will come in contact with and they can learn how to approach them as well. Also, we want offer more free language courses for all students. Lastly, the communication between students and councils of FHML should be improved. There should be more transparency from the university’s side to the students.  

In these challenging times, students had and still have a lot to worry about. Think of worries about increasing costs including an increasing student debt and worries about their health and the one of their family. We do not want students to also worry about the continuation of their study and possible study delay due to COVID-19.