Zöe Cummins has been elected Education Officer of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) on the first count, with 1,218 votes out of a valid poll of 1,361 .
Speaking after being elected Cummins said: “I had a small campaign team, they put in so much work to make this happen.”
Cummins’s campaign focused heavily on ensuring “no student gets left behind”. One of her major pledges was reforming the Foundation Scholarship (Schols) exams to make them accessible to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Another key manifesto pledge was to revive modular billing, a system whereby students can pay a fee to repeat modules without having to take a year off books to do so. Modular billing was mooted in 2019 but has not been discussed in depth since before the coronavirus pandemic.
Cummins has said repeatedly that her work doesn’t need to be “sexy” to be successful.
In an interview with The University Times, Cummins said: “Presidents can promise microwaves and student centres because that’s what the role is – education is the opposite.”
A highly technical role, the union’s education officer oversees academic affairs, from helping individual students with study-related problems to sitting on University Council, the final arbiter of scholastic decisions in Trinity. The job is significantly less public-facing than the union’s president.
“If people have a better experience and they don’t realise that that was down to my hard work, I’m okay with that”, Cummins told this newspaper. “That’s what the role dictates.”
Refining her message at Halls hustings earlier this week, she said she would walk the line between a combative and co-operative approach to working with Trinity decision makers, noting she would be willing to “step on toes, but in a way that’s respectful for everyone”.
