#Am I avoiding my dumpster fire of an inbox in pre-arrivals week? possibly

[aleanbh-and-lime]

Rant incoming...

Working in university pastoral care is wild, because it's like:

"Your September workload is 535% with incoming students who need immediate help. Dw tho, workload drops to approx. 390% as soon as assignments/adjustments start and remains unchanged until next September. Also, it never drops lower that that, lol, so work in your sleep to support them all and answer their emails when you're eating your dinner. But ✨office perk✨ we've given you a shit coffee machine to deal with it! We're also not hiring any other people hahaha"

Like, ma'am I cannot support all these students when you've increased the student ratio fourfold since last year. You can't give me 1000 students to look after singlehandedly and expect the same support from last year, are you mad?

How can we possibly run pre-arrival activities, attend induction talks for 40+ programmes, call every student for a chat and arrange individual meetings with them, scope out everyone who needs reasonable adjustments or extenuating circumstances and enforce these within departments, give extra attention to priority groups, and maintain any kind of work-life balance? This is terrible news for staff and students. This is how students screaming for help fall through the cracks and staff become burnt-out and stop performing, or quit.

When you treat your staff like this in the Wellbeing Department, what hope do we have for student provision???

#university support #pastoral care #we need funding #where is the funding #no office perks make up for understaffing #Am I avoiding my dumpster fire of an inbox in pre-arrivals week? possibly #student support