Let’s be real, I was a bit of a loner in the first few years of my young adult life. I had a rough last two years of high school, with the end of an abusive relationship and all my friends leaving school for courses at wintec. The only thing that kept me sane during that dreary part of my life was telling myself that university would be different, that I would find my people who were just as nerdy and just as idealistic as I was. My hopes did finally become a reality in the last year of my undergrad (took me long enough), but just not in the way my 17 year old self was at all expecting.

I was working as a lab instructor for PSYCH100 in A trimester last year. It was my second trimester working for the uni as a lab instructor and as a consequence I had discovered a love of teaching. At that point I had told myself that since I enjoy teaching and wasn’t too bad at doing uni, I was going to strive for a career in tertiary teaching and academia. There was one problem though…

Working for a university is actually a pretty bad deal. 

The journey of being hired as a teaching or research fellow is often one of degradation and struggle. If this is the career path you choose, there will be an endless number of fixed term contracts over your postgraduate degree, normally a mixed bag of sessional assistant, teaching assistant or research work. Due to the contracts never reaching more than six months, there is no paid leave and no sense of job security. Most importantly, if you speak up about how fucked this system is, there is a chance that your contract won’t be renewed when it ends. 

So I, being my father’s stubborn daughter, was not going to change the trajectory of my career for the sake of the uni’s series of poor business decisions. If the working conditions of my dream job were not ideal, then I would try to change the working conditions. But I knew that I couldn’t do this alone. So first I went and plead my case to the WSU, but unfortunately that did not get me far. I then went to the Tertiary Education Union (TEU), which went better, but essentially they said come back to us when you find a bunch of other student employees of the uni who are as pissed off about this as you are. 

This story is how the Student Employees Association of Waikato University (SEA) was created, and how when I couldn’t find a place to belong, I made one. The SEA is one of over 70 clubs and rōpū at the University of Waikato, and you don’t have to have the urge to go head to head with the university management to make your own club/rōpū. Just have a wander to the WSU’s reception beside Unimart and they can give you all the information you need to make your club/rōpū. If you’ve read this and think the SEA could be your place to belong as well, email us at sea.waikato@gmail.com or message us at studentemployeeswaikato on fb or sea.waikato on insta.