Student Elections 2024

Every year, students elect their representatives to four different bodies. These are the Senate and the Faculty Council on the university level (examination regulations, appointment procedures, development in research and teaching, ...) and the Student Parliament (StuPa) and the Fachschaftenrat (FSR) on the student self-administration side. If you want to find out more about the individual committees, click on the following links:

StuPa

Fachschaftenrat

Senate

If you wish to stand as a candidate, you must submit a list. You can find the documents you need to fill out under Documents, where you will also find explanations and a checklist.

The documents for the university committees are to be submitted to the university election office in Helmholtzstraße, the student election committee for StuPa and FSR can be reached at the office (N26/320) during the stated opening hours and otherwise by internal post. Please consider the deadlines!

The election committee checks the completeness and correctness of the documents you have submitted. If everything is correct, your list will be included on the ballot paper and you can be elected. If we discover an error, we will contact the contact person you provided and you will have three days to correct the error.

After the election, it takes a few days until the provisional election result is published; in parallel, the winners of the election will receive an email and can accept or reject their election. At the end of the lecture period of the summer semester, the constituent meeting of FSR and StuPa takes place. The Faculty Councils and the Senate are not constituted until the winter semester, but in the Senate there is the possibility of being invited as a guest at the July meeting in order to get to know all the faces.

The university committees convene once a month on Wednesday afternoons during the lecture period for an average of two hours. In addition, there is the reading of motions and informing oneself about possible student disagreements with the items on the agenda.

The StuPa and the FSR meet every two weeks, whereby the day of the week is fixed at the beginning of the semester. At the moment, both committees meet on Wednesday evenings. Meetings here vary from one to, when it comes to budget discussions, sometimes four or five hours.

Please bear in mind that it is not sufficient for the work in the committees if you get elected and then (in)regularly appear at the meetings. The committees thrive when topics are discussed in advance in small groups, motions are submitted and administrative tasks such as writing protocols and email correspondence are dealt with. Be aware of your responsibility towards your constituents and think carefully beforehand whether you can devote enough time to an office.

It is your job to make sure that voters know they can vote for you and why they should vote for you. So once you have submitted your list and we have checked it, you should start promoting yourselves. How you do it is entirely up to you.

However, on a voluntary basis, we offer you the opportunity to fill out a profile with pre-formulated questions. We will put up these posters on election day so that undecided voters can inform themselves at short notice. The posters can also be published on this website.

Unfortunately, it has become common practice at many universities that only a very small percentage goes to vote (around 10% in recent years). At the same time, since the introduction of self-administration in 2012, students have had the distribution of large sums of money in their hands; for the 2020 budget year, we are talking about around €250,000 and an additional €600,000 in quality assurance funds.

Regardless of the budget decision, we students can also lobby in the other bodies for things like improved teaching, the distribution of funds within the faculties, appointments of professors or generally the orientation of the student body and the university.