Daniel Trowbridge

Hi, I’m Daniel. For six months, I didn’t know that my Personal Tutor had left the Department.

There were four students in my tutor group assigned to Prof. Muggleton back in first year. We saw him only once in person, with the rest of our meetings taking place online. Most meetings concluded in under 5 minutes.

Then, sometime around January, he left the Department. None of us were notified – not by him, nor by the Senior Tutor. When we reached out for references, and later to arrange industrial placement visits, there were no replies. One of us eventually heard from his secretary that he had “retired”.

Many of my friends in our cohort have had similar experiences. One hasn’t met with his Personal Tutor since first year.

I’m running for Wellbeing Rep because I consider this far from adequate. When the supposed “first point of contact” is this unreliable, how can we be expected to trust the welfare support system?

This is the final year of our degrees. We know that times will get tough and things will go wrong – three years at Imperial have shown it plainly. I’m running because I don’t want our cohort to go unrepresented at this critical time.

If I’m elected, I will establish

• regular open consultations for raising non-confidential wellbeing issues you are facing
• concrete expectations for Personal Tutors’ engagement with reference requests
• a guarantee from the Department to notify students when their Personal Tutor changes