Hello, we are Sean Whitton and Cailean Gallagher, your affiliations officers for 2011.  The President's job is to represent the JCR to really important external bodies; our job is to liaise with slightly less important organisations.  The main one is OUSU, the Oxford University Students' Union—not to be confused with the Oxford Union, the debating society—whose fortnightly meetings we attend together with representatives of other JCRs from across Oxford and the OUSU Sabbatical Officers, who are former students employed for a year to represent Oxford students to the university.

As well as running political campaigns, OUSU staff act as advocates for students in disputes with the university and colleges and also provide welfare support.  They're not the best at advertising this sort of thing, so we will try and keep you up to date by e-mail.

While most colleges just have an OUSU Rep, we have Affiliations because our other role is to represent the JCR to the MCR, the middle common room, which is the name for Balliol's community of (post-)graduate students.  We put on social events between the two common rooms to encourage interaction, usually hijacking the MCR because it is much nicer than the JCR, and sit on the MCR Committee as well as the JCR Committee to stop the common rooms from stepping on each other's toes.  Watch out for e-mail updates on MCR happenings too.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can e-mail us: jcr.affiliations.officer@balliol.ox.ac.uk

Recent things OUSU has done for you:

• No confidence campaign

Recent JCR–MCR events:

• JCR–MCR karaoke and open mic night
• Subject crew dates matching e.g. scientists from both common rooms for a meal

Perhaps at some point we'll put some JCR–MCR photos up in the gallery; if you have any good ones, do send them in.