When I walked into Fitzbillies to meet the CUSU’s new President-elect, Priscilla Mensah, I knew immediately that I had the right person: the laptop sitting on the table in front of her bore a huge lilac sticker reading “ELECT FEMINISM NOW”, from her time spent with the National Organisation for Women.

Mensah is a campaigner through and through, and looking back on her successful run for presidency this shows through. Going into this election, there was a mood of unprecedented apathy after last year’s uncontested presidential elections, and Milo Edwards’s campaign – initially a joke – caught on to a wave of discontent with CUSU. I ask Mensah how she dealt with it and kept her nerve.

“That there ended up being four candidates for President was always going to be something that spurred on some intrigue,” she says, and she’s not wrong. 4,005 ballots were cast for the presidency this year; last time, by comparison, only 2,675 were cast, of which 1,089 were votes to re-open nominations against the unopposed candidate Helen Hoogewerf-McComb.

“Before this election, it was sort of taken for granted that students are apathetic,” she continues. “And then when four presidential candidates ran it was like ‘Oh, so what makes some people want to run for CUSU President?’ And that's where I think it really started."

“I knew that it was going to come down to being on the ground, campaigning, meeting people on site, meeting people in their colleges, making it as effective a campaign as possible in that people wanted to find out more. … I didn't think 'Students are apathetic, that's a barrier.' I recognised that if I'm on the ground, we will get stuff done.”

I ask her about a feeling of perceived resentment, of negativity, in the campaign. She frowns. “During my time campaigning on the ground, I met only a very few students who voiced very negative, quite confrontational opinions towards me."

“In my experiences campaigning, I didn't find students to be particularly apathetic … Students were asking me questions, they were challenging me on my points, how I wanted to get things done. That doesn't sound like apathy to me.”

“We're at Cambridge: students are busy. I said this before in my Varsity profile when I was running. It's about CUSU being understanding, and facilitating where they can, and I'm going to do my utmost.”

Mensah has a strong background in this sort of student advocacy. Between 2012 and 2014, she served as the Women’s Officer at Girton, while also serving as CUSU’s Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) representative for 2013–14 and co-founding the BME Women’s information network FLY.

How has this affected her work? “[Advocacy is] not something that is done easily, and I think it is something that really does involve listening to students and listening to what students want,” she tells me. “By understanding the needs of students when they get here, I wanted to be able to make a comment on how best to be engaging BME students and making them want to apply, as well.”

Mensah has made a small piece of history this year, becoming the first BME woman to be elected CUSU President. I ask her, somewhat gingerly, whether this threw up any particular obstacles.

She pauses for a moment. “No,” she answers simply.

That’s good to hear! She laughs. “Yeah, um, no. One thing that people have said to me now that I've been elected and now that I'm President-elect … for the first couple of days people were like ‘Aren't you really excited?’ And I'd be like ‘I think so!’ because I was worried they were going to call me and be like ‘Just joking!’"

“But people kept coming and saying ‘This is really, really important, you have to recognise the significance,’ that, you know, a student maybe in Year 9, a black girl who's thinking about applying will see your face and maybe that will be for her – oh, black students are at Cambridge.”

“Maybe to someone else – it could actually be like ‘I've never seen anyone who looks like me running in the past. Should I really run?’ It could have been a barrier. For me it wasn't, personally, because one I'd already taken on quite a few roles at the university at my college level and at inter-college level, and two because I was just really, really driven, so I didn't allow that to be something that impacted my running, and it wasn't ever a concern.”

“It didn't come up at any particular point, which I think is to suggest that people didn't think ‘Oh, that's that different girl.’ People didn't think that when I was running, and that's positive.”

It certainly is. Her election pledges were extremely ambitious, too, promising a ranking system for college welfare provision and to address the significant disparities in contact time between colleges. I ask her how it’s looking, one week in. She laughs uproariously.

“One week in, I'm looking only at my computer, trying to catch up on extra work that I've missed!” She gestures to the textbook sitting on the table next to her pot of tea.

“But no. In considering running, I considered it very carefully, I considered how incredibly life-changing and positive my experience has been here, and what I feel are the aggregate issues that, were they different, would have impacted my experiences even more positively.”

The welfare ranking pledge is a difficult one, involving the collation of complex sources of data. “There isn't a lot of information available,” she agrees. “The way in which I saw it being done would involve a lot of work on the CUSU front, and involve a lot of work among the student union, and would involve a lot of insight from the student population itself.”

“I think it would involve potentially three things,” she says, and begins to count them off on her fingers. “A combination of external bodies, so potentially going to external charities … and asking them to help us consult on the practice that colleges are using and how they're good and how they're not so great.”

“Going to JCRs themselves and the welfare officers and asking [them] ‘Do you feel supported by your college?’ I do know from speaking to people that a lot of students will end up feeling, as welfare officers, they end up being one of the main sources of support for students, and they're also doing their degree and they need support.”

“Thirdly, it'd be about asking the student population on a survey level, much like student satisfaction data that you use for ranking universities on a national level … Ask some of those complex and nuanced questions that you don't necessarily get on surveys at the moment. Then bring them together and get something coherent.”

Inevitably this will involve a difficult, subjective judgement, presumably to be made by CUSU before the publication of any such rankings. She nods. “Of course, it's not finalised yet, but I think it's promising. I hope those three things together would actually provide something a lot more comprehensive than what we currently have, which is a mismatched system where you go to your tutor and they tell you what they think the college may have; that needs to change, immediately.”

What about academic disparities? If anything, that’s an even more formidable task, trying to reform the practices of faculties, departments and colleges. She pauses before she answers.

“It's not necessarily about getting lots of contact time, because for some students who get a lot more it's like ‘I can't actually handle the work that I'm being given.’ It's about bringing everyone to the right point, getting the optimum amount of contact time for their course. … If on your application you're told to apply because all colleges are more or less the same … that should be true."

“We should be moving towards more of a departmentalisation across courses, and actually taking a moment to examine specifically the courses of students where things are working well, and comparing them to the students for whom things are working poorly, and asking where exactly we can start making the differences.”

These are uncommonly large commitments, though, and I press her as to whether it might be more realistic to get things moving and leave it for future years to finish.

She hesitates, thinking carefully about her answer. “It's a hard question to answer now. We don't know exactly what will become a priority for the university next year.”

But as of now? “JCRs and rents, firstly, I'd say that issue isn't one that's tackled in an absolute sense. It's pressure, it's a consistent thing on CUSU's part to make sure that when the issues arise for JCRs we are helping them in every way possible to negotiate.”

“The ranking: I will get that done, but that's going to be changing over the years. It won't stay the same. Hopefully things will be moving upwards, and they'll all be getting better. These are things that I hope to get moving, but none of them are ever going to be finished.”

“They are ongoing issues; I plan to make the changes, but to say that the subsequent presidents won't have to continue working on them would be inaccurate.”

The near-victory for the organised RON campaign in last year’s presidential elections may have come as a shot across the bows for CUSU. Mensah’s victory, by a significant margin against Milo Edwards, her main rival, is encouraging, but she has a long way to go before CUSU’s reputation is repaired.

As we part ways, I reflect that it seems CUSU has been left in good hands for the upcoming year. I hope I’m right in that assessment: if she can stem the wave of disaffiliations and maintain the level of interest that led to the highest electoral turnout in a decade, she will already be doing well; if she can do this while also delivering on her campaign pledges, she will be deserving of a statue in Market Square.