Do you want to be a Union Officer? If you do, unlucky. Nominations closed last week.
So, perhaps more pertinently, do you know what a Union Officer is?
Well, they’re the micro-celebs of Sheffield Union. Seven Sheffield graduates and one undergraduate who have donated a year of their life to providing a voice for their peers.
They’re a visible lot nowadays. Not just via gigantic posters looming over the Concourse, but also at the cutting edge of social networking.
They blog and tweet away on anything and everything; from the sounds of pneumatic drills emerging from the rebuild, to the pressing news of where a fresh batch of condoms can be pilfered.
And when a 30p paper from the Union Shop or a Coffee Rev Iced Mocha isn’t enough to keep them occupied, a video-blog won’t be far away.
In return for a year under the microscope, 2010’s successful candidates will pocket a £17k salary; a palatable enough figure to help live out 12 more months in student suburbia.
Okay, so there are those 40-odd-hour weeks trapped in a lofty office with only a giant-size print of yourself and your colleagues for company.
And there are those interminable fortnightly debates at Union Council where you must resist wringing the neck of the upstart Union councillors who insist on talking and talking.
And importantly, eating into the time you and fellow Sabbs had set aside to film yourselves cooking a fish pie and uploading it to YouTube.
Not content with mere discussion, they’ll persist until you’re forced to come back to next Council with another report.
But it isn’t all bad. There’s always a chance to get away from it all with a Union scouting trip to the delightful settings of Northumbria or Warwick.
Anyway, it beats signing on. And that’s what I’ll be doing in five months time if I can’t convince the Westmoreland Gazette that I’m good enough to justify £14k-a-year to be their Church Fête Correspondent.
More likely, you’ll bump into me down the job centre on West Street. And I can’t promise I won’t be wiggling my hips and whistling the tune to ‘Hot Stuff’ as I wait with cap in hand.
For those of you who’ve had the foresight to try and sidestep the graduate job crush by bidding to become a Union Officer, a furious few weeks of campaigning beckons.
But before you get ahead of yourselves planning a manifesto, you first need to come up with a catchy catch-line (ideally catchier than ‘catchy catch-line’), and nurture a new, warm-to-me personality.
After all, when I logged in to the polling station last year and mulled over my votes, Paul Tobin’s promise ‘to embed democracy at every level of our organisation’ was hardly ringing in my ears.
Nor was Martin Bailey’s determination to ‘encourage better communication and increased loyalties to the Union using innovative technologies…’ well, you get the idea.
All my fickle and limited memory could relay to me was ‘Tall Paul’ and ‘Bank on Bailey’, followed by a vague recollection of a Bummit hoodie with a chirpy smile, and a fun, frizzy head of hair respectively.
So Piers Morgan needn’t tear out your soul on national telly. Rhyming and alliteration: the sure-fire way to Sabbatical success in a time rife with stereotypical student voting apathy.