 I'm here at DCU in Glassenem, where student union elections are fast approaching. This year, running for the position of Vice President of Education and Placement, are Craig McHugh and Adam Hanlon. I get a chance to sit down with the two guys to discuss their manifestos. So Craig, you're in for the position of Vice President of Education and Placement. Why did you run for this position in the first place? So Ian, I wanted to run for this position next year actually for Education and Placement. I see there's a great candidate running for the position earlier on when the nominations were originally opened. So I said, I'm not going to run, but I decided to run this year when that individual dropped out. And I'm running because I value the student's union and I value education within the student's union. I think this position and the position of academic affairs, as well as the President of the University of Vatican, particularly these two positions, hold a very important influence on education policy within the university. It's a real opportunity to actually change things and improve the education of students on the ground. Even if it's only a little help, it can go very, very far. So that's the kind of motivation for this role in particular. And part of this role, a huge part of this role is helping students with work placement and interest a big part of DCU students. What are you going to do to help maintain support and maybe even improve support for students? Absolutely. So the support that's available right now in DCU is fantastic. The work that's been done by the last two VPs, Matt and Manus, has been brilliant too. If we look at placement and we split it up, maybe there's more placement, just interim teaching placement. But if we just look at those two things in particular, I want to do for teaching placement, I want to set up a new SU placement shop. What this will do is allow students that are going on placement to come down to the Pat's Campus Students Union Centre and get their resources, like arts and crafts and paper and whatnot. So they don't have to trek over to Tesco on a cold February night like we had last week, or during November or whatever when it's the dark evenings and that. Just want to have it there accessible because there's a lot of stress on placement students that I've heard from and, you know, they're coming home at five, six o'clock during the library for another four hours. The last thing they want is to have to trek into town for resources. And then in terms of for interest students, I think the interest system is fantastic. But I'd like to look into re-expanding the companies that are available for the interest, maybe think differently. But really what needs to happen is the interbore needs an entire revamp. So that's why I'm looking into setting up an SU computing partnership. And what this is going to do is allow students within the engineering and computing faculty to come up with ideas to revamp the interbore system. It's meaningful work for them and they'll be paid for it. And look, if the ideas that come out of it happen to be, you know, decent, then it's students actually making a change from the bottom right up to the top. And to build on that too, if that's a success, I'd like to get them on board for my SU book swap app, which is very simple. It's just like don't deal or adverts.ie. It happens already in DCU through Facebook pages. But I think if we centralise it in an app that's supported by the Students Union, that the students know about from the first day of first year during orientation, it would make things and life much easier. And your role as a part of DCU had a role in humanities this year. How is that going to help you with your new position next year or possibly position next year? Absolutely. My role as faculty convener has been an absolute blast. I've met so many people and it's been it's been great. But really what I've learned is there's some things you can do and some things you can't do and there's some things you just have to keep pushing for it. And that's why the question is what will you do different to the education vice president last year? It's not what I'm going to do different. What am I going to keep pushing for it? Because these things in the Students Union, they don't happen over one year periods. They happen over a long period of time. The Students Union has been like a hammer hitting against a big wall. You just have to wait to break through it eventually. So that's the way I envision it. I think I'm going to use the contacts I've made, but realistically the ideas I've had and under Vino's guidance or whatever and under the other sabbaticals and what I've learned from that, who to go to, how to deal with situations, how to position yourself within the bodies that deal with education policy in the university. And so I think that's going to really, really help me. Great. Thank you so much for talking to us. Look, nice to see you. So Adam, you're also running for vice president of education and placement. Why did you decide to run for this role in the first place? Well, a lot of people have been saying to me lately that, you know, why are you running like, you know, you don't actually have placement on your course and you don't really involve in education. And it's one of the main reasons I am running. I feel like placement from talking to people and talking to students on placement is so important. It's such a kickstart to your career that I feel like for smaller faculties that don't actually have that placement opportunity, I really want to push to have every student one day to start that work and to have placement and have that experience to kickstart their career. Is there anything in particular in terms of, you know, working on work placement because it's such a huge part of DCU students that you would maybe help to maintain and then maybe even improve on next year? Well, basically what I'm looking to improve on is the actual system itself. So I've heard a lot of issues surrounding companies pulling out of interplacement things and students not necessarily having as big a say as I believe they should. So I know a lot of problems around students having to take their first choice on interplacement. We really should be pushing for that to be a student focused program and for the students to have more of a say. And I think that I, if I was given the opportunity to have the role of education placement, could be the forefront of that push to have more of a student focused approach. And do you have any kind of experiences of college in the past that you think really help you suit this role? Well, I've had a lot of experience with societies in particular. So I'm heavily involved with Law Society this year and I've been since I started. So I'm the moot court convener for Law Society. Now, a lot of people won't know what moot court is. Essentially what moot court is, it's advocacy, it's public speaking. And essentially my role there is to organize those competitions. So I've been the figurehead of basically an advocacy movement for the Law Society, which has gone really well this year. We're way up on membership and I feel like this year the Law Society has really taken off and I feel like I've been a major part in that. And a few of us thought that this might have gone uncontested. A few of the roles are gone uncontested, but you are running against someone else. How has the campaign been so far? Yeah, campaigns have been great and we've been getting a lot of interaction with students, which is fantastic to see. Just been going around campus on the ground, engaging with students. They really are actually engaging with the education placement position, which I think is fantastic because it's such it can be such a big position because the DCU experience, the education experience is something I really want to push for. Adam, thanks very much for your best look. Great. Thank you. So those are your two candidates. Make sure you stay up to date with all our election coverage across all our different social media platforms. I'm Ian Mangan with DCU TV News.