Leading up to the start of her campaign, Nina Thyr sat down with Forge Press to discuss her plans to run for Trustee in this year’s SU elections and how she would navigate this position if elected.
To begin with, we asked her why she had decided to run for this position, to which she responded “I think that somebody’s got to do it, and you need someone who cares and someone who has the experience to actually make a difference. And I am both of those things, I reckon.” Nina told us she has secured a full-time job in e-commerce, in addition to having built her own tutoring business in a year, which she said has given her confidence in understanding financial regulations, complexities and jargon.
This combined with her firsthand experiences with the SU’s financial support services is what she believes to give her both the “motivation” and the “means” to succeed as a trustee should she be elected. “The student body needs to be able to have something that’s immediately accessible, and I want to be the person to push for that. I want to make sure that all decisions that the SU passes actually do stay true to its mission statement, because at the end of the day, the students union is a charity and the responsibility of a charity is to deliver on its mission statement.”
When talking us through her manifesto, Nina expressed her aims for making financial support services more accessible and reliable. “I want the SU to be secure, and not just financially”, she said. “I want to make sure that all decisions that the SU passes are prioritising student experience.” This relates, she said, not only to the quality of these services, but also their reliability and trustworthiness; “I want people to be more confident that when they’re stepping into the Student’s Union that they are stepping into a building that they can trust, with people that they can trust in it, people that they can point to and confidently say ‘Oh, I can get support from this person!’”
During campaign season Nina plans to make her presence known around campus with fish-themed visuals, inspired by the “fish girl” meme; “whenever I introduce myself to people, everyone says, ‘Oh Nina, like fish girl!’ So I figure I figured that I would tap into that and pick something that most people remember, even if they remember it negatively.”
