Club Spotlight: The 93% Club Edinburgh
As many of you know, The 93% Club’s reach spreads far across the UK, with over 50 clubs representing our #StateSchoolProud message.
To recognize the incredible work of our clubs and the people behind their efforts, we’ll be featuring some of the clubs in our showcase series.
The first club in focus is The 93% Club Edinburgh, which represents the student community of The University of Edinburgh. I sat down with Grace Mai Clark (She/Her) the club’s president, and a proud state-schooler, to discuss her experiences as club president and the work being done.
I asked grace to introduce herself and give me a brief overview of the 93% club edinburgh.
Grace is a third-year Philosophy and Politics student at the University of Edinburgh, and the president of The 93% Club Edinburgh, where she works with around a 15-member team of committee members to run the university’s branch of the state school network.
Since becoming the president of the society, she and the executive committee have watched the the club become a valuable student space within Edinburgh.
Career development opportunities and liberation work have taken centre stage under Grace’s leadership. She strongly believes that many state-educated individuals often have intersecting identities.
Therefore, a lot of the work she has been carrying out in Edinburgh involves campaigning for sub-groups to have more visibility within the state-educated cohort. In previous years the committee has endeavoured to elect certain roles such as ‘LGBTQ+ officer’, ‘BME officer’, and ‘Disabilities officer’ to accommodate these specific needs.
Grace has been club president since March 2023, starting earlier than most presidents due to the shorter-term dates at The University of Edinburgh.
She was the outreach officer for the club in the previous academic year and first discovered The 93% Club Edinburgh towards the end of her first year, coming along to an open meeting which she had spotted on her Instagram feed.
After attending some previous societies at the university, and never really feeling a sense of belonging, Grace described it as being a pleasant surprise to find others from her background when finding the community.
She also described how she had very rarely come across another individual with a northern accent, so found a community that championed students from all walks of life extremely refreshing.
We then discussed what inspired grace to get involved with the 93% club in the first place.
The chance to hear other individuals with common experiences was one of the main reasons why Grace decided to get involved in the club.
The 93% Club Edinburgh understand that a student’s first year at many of the elitist universities in the UK can often be very overwhelming, particularly for state-educated students. They also recognize that many students simply brush these struggles off as ‘just a me issue’.
However, facilitating a safe space to allow for state-educated students to understand that there are people out there who share these common struggles is important, and this has become a priority for the club.
I asked Grace to tell me about some of the work that’s happened during her time at the club.
Grace explained how she had seen significant growth in the club’s membership and was proud of the fact that the club was becoming increasingly active, with weekly meet ups and a range of activities and events held for their members on a regular basis.
She described how the club currently has 3 aims for the forthcoming year:
professional development and careers
building a safe space within the university’s state-educated community
campaigning
The club believes that professional development and career-focused activities are vital for club members, but were also determined to ensure that the experiences being offered were free from judgement and accessible for as many students as possible.
Edinburgh’s committee believed that the university often assumed that all students had the same level of knowledge when it came towards professional hurdles, and that the development of those who may not have received equal opportunities was often overlooked.
To combat this, the team at Edinburgh want to ensure that they could create an environment for this growth and allow young professionals from all backgrounds the space to “share their experiences and support one another within the community”.
The team also actively seeks out guest speakers from state-educated backgrounds to build a closer relationship between the speaker and students.
At the heart of the society, Edinburgh’s branch describes itself as a social place, and an inclusive and accessible environment.
Since Scottish students often are younger than many others across the UK due to the academic year system within Scotland, the team keeps this in mind when organizing events, ensuring that members would still have access to socials and other activities, regardless of their age.
Grace has made an active effort to increase the accessibility of the club for those students who may commute to university, are mature students or those who had taken time away from education. She also considers other factors that may affect the willingness and ease to get involved with their branch of the club.
She described to me that she recognised that nobody is “just state-educated” and how many student identities were a lot more complex than that. She also shared that it was important to her as president of the society to understand the complicated identities of all students.
Grace also took great pride in speaking about the campaigning work being done by the team at Edinburgh, which has led to remarkable visibility for the club.
Previous campaigns include the team’s ‘State School Proud’ videos published by previous club president Andrew Wilson (he/him) and edited by Andrew Perry (he/him). This particular campaign had led to recognition for Edinburgh’s team on STV, BBC Radio Scotland and The Times. These videos are an informative watch and can be found on their Instagram and TikTok channels.
Grace explained that much of her reasoning behind wanting to focus on campaigning was to ensure that future students ‘didn’t have the repeat of the negative issues that she had experienced as a result of an elitist environment’.
The 93% Club Edinburgh was also proud to announce that they had worked closely with and lobbied their university to train staff members on classism and discrimination. By doing this, the team at Edinburgh aims to make sure every member of staff has an increased awareness of the problem and can make a conscious effort to not facilitate bias.
We want to showcase clubs that have gone above and beyond in their commitment to supporting state-educated students. we asked grace how she thought the 93% Club edinburgh has achieved this.
Grace described her club as particularly vocal when it comes to the uphill battle of social mobility but hopes that the recognition of being showcased has come due to the tireless work that she and her committee have been doing on campus.
She believed the recognition could be for the work the club is doing to drive systemic change at the University of Edinburgh and make class bias training mandatory for all university staff, hoping this will lead to more inclusivity and positivity.
This push for mandatory training has seen the team getting the word out on campus, urging staff and students alike to understand the struggles of state-educated students, recognise the privilege that a private school background can bring, and hopefully come to some positive resolutions to the struggles that some students are having on campus.
Grace understands that unfortunately, class is not yet at a point where it is a widely recognised issue, but she hopes that during her period of club presidency, her team can make enough noise on campus that class becomes more widely discussed by members of the university as something which can advantage or disadvantage students.
The club has seen the beginnings of change on campus, following the aforementioned visualisation through the State School Proud videos, The University of Edinburgh has agreed to work closely with The 93% Club Edinburgh to begin addressing and understanding the concerns that have been raised by the committee. The committee is also planning a second round of the successful State School Proud videos for the coming term.
WE asked Grace if there was one particular event, social or campaign that she was particularly proud of.
Grace spoke a lot about the active calendar of events which The 93% Edinburgh has been facilitating, in particular the breadth of professional development opportunities being provided, as well as more light-hearted socials and casual meet-ups.
One point that stood out to me was the fact that The 93% Edinburgh’s socials didn’t just limit themselves to alcohol-related outings, the club has made a conscious effort to provide a variety of activities for students with varying lifestyles.
Grace described how she is keen for her student team to ensure that all barriers are broken with student engagement, and the need for the club to hold socials at a variety of times so that students can come and get involved regardless of their schedule. One social which stood out to me was their regular daytime coffee shop meet, cleverly branded ‘Social Mobil-tea’!
The club regularly meet on a Thursday evening in the Chaplaincy Room on campus, holding regular sessions was part of the club’s mission to develop a sense of companionship between members. But the club makes it very clear that members can pick and choose when they come along whenever suits their schedule.
Grace described making a change at university, getting a foot in the door, and hopefully leaving a long-standing legacy at the university as her particular highlights during her term as club president. She encourages future club members to apply for club committee roles, highlighting it as a perfect opportunity to gain a sense of self-empowerment whilst gaining some great transferable skills.
I asked Grace to share any recent accomplishments in which The 93% Club Edinburgh was particularly proud of.
Something that The 93% Club Edinburgh team was hugely excited about sharing was their “Speaking Out: Tackling Accent Bias at an Elite University event”, which took place on the 23rd of November.
The event provided around 200 students and staff members an opportunity to understand the issue of accent bias whilst providing a panel of academic professionals to discuss the issue which the team felt was very prominent on elite university campuses.
The event was run in collaboration with ‘Tackling Elitism’ and the university’s ‘Department of Linguistics and English Language’. The event sold out quickly and was a huge success for the team at Edinburgh, providing a platform for some very prominent issues to be addressed and providing representation for an aspect of classism which is very rarely highlighted.
For the rest of her term as club president, Grace wants to put on plenty more professional events. It is the team at The 93% Club Edinburgh’s first year of fully in-person meetings, after being established during the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, she describes a lot of the work being conducted as very trial and error but hopes that the work being conducted this year has led to a very promising future for the branch.
Finally, I asked Grace why students at The University of Edinburgh should get involved with This branch of the 93% Club.
The team at The 93% Club Edinburgh were adamant that finding likeminded people can be hugely beneficial for state-educated students at The University of Edinburgh. They encourage anyone feeling a sense of imposter syndrome or just simply wanting to build a greater state-educated network of friends to come along to one of their upcoming meetings, or reach out to the club by direct message.
I would like to say a huge thank you to Grace Mai Clark and the team at The 93% Club Edinburgh for taking the time to shine a spotlight on their branch of The 93% Club network!
I am also looking forward to the next club spotlight which will be coming your way in the coming weeks, with the end goal to spotlight the individual efforts being made by our incredible student volunteers across the United Kingdom.