I am a psychology student with a broad range of academic interests. I am part of many academic societies that already exist at the university but when discussing with friends we all found a similar issue. We would hear about events being run within our own disciplines -but only via word of mouth or very frequent engagement in many other societies would we hear about other interesting events outside of our discipline. Originally I simply thought about creating a social media account in which I would post details about all the different events at the uni - saving students time and allowing them to have all the information in one place. However I realised I wanted to create more than that.

I spoke to a friend at Warwick who is heavily involved in a society called Think Tank. I realised that it is what I wanted to be a part of and it does not exist at Exeter. It is a community of students from a range of disciplines who all share a love of learning. This society allows students to engage producing work and solutions to major issues through policy.

We would offer students the opportunity to:

-Attend speaker events and panels 

-firstly we would ask internal lecturers to speak on topics of interest to them and the students (solely through our Think Tank)  but we would also make students aware of existing talks happening already at the university through other societies.

-we would then aim to extend to external academics, politicians, journalists and other experts asking them to speak to Think Tank students when we have a large enough society.

-Write articles and publish their work

-students would be able to become frequent contributors - (a requirement of 2 articles a term) or simply submit work at random for our editors to overview and publish on social media and eventually our website.

-later into our society's journey we would aim to publish a termly policy report around the chosen sectors of the society (this could be foreign affairs, healthcare, education, technology and innovation, energy and environment, economy and finance, justice and human rights.)

I am aware that the scale of Warwick Think Tank allows them to offer amazing events with incredible guest speakers on a very large scale. They have sponsorships and started their journey 11 years ago. I have very big ideas, but I am aware that this is the start of a society that is not anywhere near the size of Warwick- however I am asking to simply start this journey.