A word from incoming CSN President Lin Liu

I’m Lin Liu. This is my first newsletter as the new CSN President, and I would like to briefly introduce myself and touch on my priorities for the next year.

Background and priorities

I started the CIPFA apprenticeship scheme as a finance trainee in the North East with Newcastle City Council. At the end of last year, I passed all the exams, submitted the portfolio and am now a fully qualified Chartered Public Finance Accountant (CPFA) working in Cambridgeshire County Council’s internal audit team.

When I was a CIPFA student, I experienced hard times. However, I was lucky. I received support from CIPFA, my colleagues, and those lovely case study group mates. Now, as Student President, I want to give back. I would like to transfer my learning experience into three priorities to help my fellow students.

The first one is supporting: to support students in achieving exam success by listening to your voice, coordinating you and CIPFA, and continuing to provide a national student case study WhatsApp group. This means that your concerns will be better heard and will be represented to CIPFA anonymously through our monthly CSN committee meeting.

The second priority is connecting: to connect the regional student networks to the national ones. We will engage with your region to create an overall positive, sharing and effective student network. This means that your regional student network and student events will get better support, so you will have more options to volunteer and therefore fulfil your potential.

The third priority is diversity. This value will be embedded in all things we do here. In particular, we will continue to provide virtual career stories, where we will invite speakers who are from different backgrounds, at different career stages and with different career paths to share their success stories. At the CSN, we believe there is no one size fits all when it comes to success. All kinds of success stories are worth sharing, so students will gain inspiration from the career stories and find their way to success.

The CSN is committed to helping students achieve their exam and personal development success. However, we can do little without your involvement, so please do get in touch with us via our student mailbox, CSN@cipfa.org. Your concerns and suggestions will be fed back to CIPFA.

Volunteering

We are now looking for new volunteers to join the National Student Network as well. The current vacancies are:

  • Honorary Secretary
  • Honorary Treasurer
  • Vice President

If you are interested in any of the roles, please send your application to CSN@cipfa.org. In your application, please explain why you’d like to volunteer and briefly highlight some of your most relevant experiences. If you have questions about any of the roles and what’s involved, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!

In this section