Dear Fellow RCS Alumni,
First of all, season’s greetings and hope all is good with you and your families as we come to the end of another year. This has been an amazing year for the RCSA with lots of good stuff going on that you will see in the content below and on our website and media feeds https://rcsa.org.uk/ but it is important to say right up front that the Association still has some major challenges ahead and we need more help from you, our alumni!
Our biggest challenge, I believe, is our membership! Thank you to those of you (in your hundreds) who are paid up members but there are literally tens of thousands of RCS alumni out there who are not members. What can we do about this? Firstly, please check that your membership is up to date and that direct debit payments have not expired to help us get an accurate list of up-to-date members. Secondly, please talk with your alumni peer groups to encourage them to join or at least to connect with us and see what we are doing. We need to increase our membership to help with funding and so that more alumni can get involved in the work we do. In a volunteer organisation human resources are always in short supply. We know that in recent years in particular, very few new graduates are joining the RCSA and we need to do a better job of connecting with them while they are still in College. We will need your help with this as well…. Read on for more details, and update your membership at https://rcsa.org.uk/membership/.
So, 2024 has been a good year the RCSA with lots of activity. The joint RCS Motor Club/RCSA dinner at the London Museum of Water and Steam back in March was our first for many years and was a wonderful evening. We already have dates for a joint RCSU/RCSA dinner in 2025 for the weekend of 6/7 June in London so please put that in your diary already and we will confirm details as soon as we can. We contributed the “RCSA Question” and a team of adjudicators to the RCSU Science Challenge (which the RCSA instigated back in 2006), and we are industriously working on Science Challenge 2025 which will launch on 27th January.
The RCSA has been hard at work supporting students and recently introduced the third of a hat-trick of student support grants with the launch of the Levy Awards which are short term bursaries provided to hardship students in the form of a supermarket gift card to ensure they are able to buy food. The Randerson Awards and Ellingham Awards introduced last year complete the trinity and show that the RCSA is putting funds to good use supporting students when and where it counts!
Perhaps the highlight of 2024 was the RCSA project to reinstall the lost WW1 and WW2 RCS war memorial tablets. The tablets were tragically lost in the seventies when the Old RCS building was knocked down. Fast forward to June 2024 and the damaged WW2 tablet was found in College. The RCSA stepped in and managed the repair of the WW2 tablet and the making of a replica WW1 tablet and had them both installed in the foyer of the RCS1 building in college in time for the Armistice Day wreath laying ceremony in November. Thanks to the Faculty (FoNS) and many generous alumni who helped with donations to cover the cost of the work. So now, finally after 50 years RCS joins RSM and C&G with a complete set of memorial tablets to honour the memory of our students and staff who lost their lives during those conflicts.
The RCSA Trust continues its’ great work supporting student expeditions and 2024 has been one of the busiest years ever! 4 expeditions including RCS students or postgraduates received funding from the Trust. The expeditions were to Kyrgyzstan, Switzerland, the Outer Hebrides and the Japanese Island of Kyushu. Details of the expeditions are available on the website https://rcsa.org.uk/?s=expedition
Thinking forward to 2025 we must work harder to re-engage with both RCS alumni and students and look for more opportunities to bring them together. The joint RCSU/RCSA dinner in June next year will be one such opportunity. We are also planning a trial careers guidance event with BioChemSoc on February 11th 2025 and if successful we will work through the other RCS departmental societies with similar events. Any alumni who would like to help with these careers events should get in touch through contact@rcsa.org.uk. It can be a very rewarding experience.
So a good year for the RCSA in 2024 and we hope that 2025 will be even better with a growing membership, better engagement with current RCS students and more alumni joining in the interactions. Please reach out and get in touch if you have the time and interest to help us.
Best wishes and kind regards,
Mike Munroe
RCSA President
contact@rcsa.org.uk
https://rcsa.org.uk/
(This message has been emailed to members and is reproduced verbatim here. If you like the support we offer to our students, why not help us do more? Consider making a donation to the RCSA Trust here. With no staff and no building costs you can be assured that every penny of your donation will be gratefully received and faithfully applied to assist the students of the Royal College of Science).
You could donate any amount you wish, but why not donate £100 right now?