The year 2012 in review

Well its that time of the year again and here's what's been happening this year: both good and bad
The good stuff:
* We both got a grant from Student Union for some of our stuff and increased funding for our things so we were able to do more stuff like the Taste of Melbourne, The Royal Melbourne show, The big art market etc.
* The new SAB building at RMIT means less absestos, but students will have to bring a laptop. What the?
* Katherine joined the Newintstudents team.
* Katherine took up Desktop Publishing meaning that we were able to do the logo amoungst other things in Semester 2
* More events are happening in RMIT Bundoora. In previous years this wasn't the case
* International students in NSW get travel concession where as Victoria does not. This is a good start but more needs to be done about this
* The introduction of SSAF is a good chance for RMIT to improve their services for students and we eagerly await these changes
* We joined Nuffnang which means more freebies for us.
* We also did some product reviews
* We also started the housing reviews
* We tried lots and lots of different cuisines such as Mexican

The nasty stuff:
* RMIT's new assesment policies meant that many people were left in the lurch. The team at Newintstudents blog as well as RMIT Student Union are protesting these changes. There were several meetings with the Human Rights Commission in Semester 2 when the new policy on Assesment was drafted
* Decreased funding for TAFE meant that a lot of students are worse off. It also means an increase in the tuition fees for next year.
* MYKI system- although this was going for some time, the government decided to switch off metcard entirely leaving tourists and temporary travellers in disarray. A lot of new international students will need to pay the card fee of $6.
* Finding out that 1600 students get excluded from RMIT each year.
* One of our friends Ivy got excluded this year because RMIT didn't care about her enough.
* Finding out that RMIT only requires a band of 6.5 in IELTS when in actual fact students need a  band of 7 for English. RMIT Student Union as well as us are proposing that RMIT changes the band of English to a 7.
* A few more attacks on International students especially Indian students has decreased the number of applications in Victoria
* The cleaner scandal where students are paid a lot less than the minimum wage.
* More and more train stations are unstaffed making it dangerous for people and more internationals might be vulnerable to more attacks late at night. But then again what is RMIT doing to educate students about this?
* Finding out that many internationals students are using ghost writers

Things that we would like to see happening in the new year are:
* RMIT being more understanding of students and not excluding them
* RMIT raising the band to a 7 like all the other universities
* Cleaners being paid the proper wage
* Concession fees for international students
* Paper tickets for the occassional visitor and more train stations being staffed
* More education about plagiarism especially at RMIT
* We also hope that RMIT improves their student services among other things to make it less stressful for students

We hope that all goes well. We also hope that the housing guides and other things are up soon. Merry Christmas and a happy new year.