Tine is here to help you out

As a student, life is hard enough, trying to balance academic ambitions, tedious school labour and financial survival. When also faced with bureaucratic challenges from your own university, it can feel like drowning in a sewer.

For this reason, the rector took the initiative and created the first ever UCPH student ambassador. The decision was brought about as a student wrongly accused of theft, in the high tides of the Penkowa-scandal, revealed UCPH’s complex and entangled rule systems.

After a long selection process, not that dissimilar to X-factor tryouts, it was 37 year old lawyer Tine Kaare who was chosen.

Rights, dispensations

So who is this all-student’s-superwoman? In an old, beautifully restored office at the University Library, you can find Tine Kaare. Her office space has a see-through door, which corresponds well with the thought behind the student ambassador.

“Although it can be a bit difficult to get into the building here”, Tine laughs, “I really want all students to know that they are always welcome to stop by. I will even come to them” she says.

Yet, 61 students have somehow found their way to Tine. Some students knock because they have been accused of cheating and need someone to inform them about their rights. Others asks about applications for dispensation or the wait for exam results.

Its all about the end users

Decorated by more empty bookshelves than books, Tine has brought in her personal collection of hippopotamuses from a long career in public administration.

One is from Uganda, one she got from her niece from a Christmas fair, several were given to her form co-workers at the Danish Immigration Service, a few she found herself. Prior to helping frustrated students at University of Copenhagen, she has spent most of her professional life after graduating law school helping frustrated asylum-seekers in Denmark.

“To me, what is motivating, is to feel that you make a difference to someone. Whether that someone is an asylum seeker from Rwanda, a student of humanities or an unemployed single mother”, Tine says, “it is all about the end users and accommodating their needs”.

Julie.vulpius@adm.ku.dk

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