DAVIANNE Tucker, 22-year-old president-elect of the Guild of Students at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, plans to introduce some ambitious initiatives when she takes her seat next academic year.

“The overarching objective I want my team to achieve in the upcoming academic year is a new style of advocacy, leadership, and development through innovative strategies (plus) foster(ing) a real partnership with the students,” she told Career & Education in an interview last week.

More specifically, she is planning to expose her corps to leadership training and to introduce skills training, through the HEART Trust/NTA, to the wider school population.

“Regarding leadership, our councillors will be taken through a series of workshops to significantly increase their leadership capabilities and to facilitate a more robust, positive impact as student leaders on campus. We will also have a liaison team with individuals representing every cohort, so our scope of student issues is not limited, and advocacy can take place with a larger voice on an institutional, national and regional scale,” she explained.

On the matter of the skills training, Tucker said she intends to have the guild partner with HEART on a comprehensive programme leading to certification in bartending, electronic repairs and events planning and management, as she believes university students must be equipped with a skill and related work experience upon graduation.

“My team’s approach to advocacy will encompass a more holistic strategy involving students and their solutions to fixing our issues,” Tucker said. “We are planning for this to happen in numerous phases. The first phase will involve our ‘Fix Things’ campaign. For this, councillors will be required on three days of each month to target campus students with the objective of getting to know them better and record their issues. I believe the more we connect with our students, the more we’ll be able to achieve.”

She told Career & Education that her guild team will use four telephone lines — ‘The President’s Hotline’ — and an e-mail address through which students can contact her.

“Through these mediums we will be able to increase our touch points across campus, create a wide database and feasibly reach more of our students,” the president-elect said.

Tucker, a strong, determined and hard-working young woman who hails from Brown’s Town in St Ann, said she knew she was destined for leadership since childhood, her vision having started when she was a student at Brown’s Town Primary School, where she served as head girl.

“I believe I was born to serve people. Being afforded the opportunity by the students of the university to do so, and at the highest level, is one I’m extremely grateful for and will push to all ends not to stumble over. I cannot and will not disappoint them,” she said.

Tucker, who previously served as guild librarian and secretary, got news that she had won the presidential election on March 18.

“I was not in the room in which it was announced. I was called by a friend who just said in a monotone that I had won, so I wasn’t sure. It felt unbelievable, until I began running towards the room and students kept hugging me and repeating congratulations. It was an emotional experience. I saw men cry, I saw women cry and it was just really euphoric the way so many people – people I didn’t even know (previously), or who I met on the campaign trail, felt moved by my victory,” the young woman said.

She is pursuing a degree in marketing, but Tucker doesn’t just want a single career.

“There are a number of things I’d want to engage in: media, corporate relations and management, entrepreneurship within the service industry and organisational psychology, so I have not chosen a single path yet, and I probably will not. The one that appeals mostly to my interest is Tactical Product Management and, of course, owning my own business, because I am a strategist at heart with an interest in innovation and developing new ways/styles of fulfilling a need or solving a problem,” she said.