B-Soc Exec 16-month Term Summary
Hey everyone, we’re your friendly B-Society Executive with our last Executive updates ever! Well, 16 months have gone by in A FLASH, and the new executive will be taking over after August. We will miss you! Before we go, we wanted to give you a brief overview of everything that has gone down since we started, and achievements that we are particularly proud of.
President – Hannah Gautreau
I can’t believe that 16 months have already passed! I think that my biggest accomplishment as president was to make a huge push from the student body about mental health issues on campus. We have started running Let’s Talk Mental Health, we have partnered with The Friendship Bench organization, and I have made huge amounts of progress with making faculty aware of student opinion about resources on campus. I have made an effort to encourage more active discussion in council meetings, and I am happy with the progress that EngSoc has made. We have started moving in a much more advocacy driven direction by taking official stances and encouraging people to actually mandate the executive to make changes. I am so happy to be passing the torch to Rachel, who is going to be fantastic. Thank you so much for election and for an amazing 16 months as President!
VP Education – Anson Chen
There are three general things I achieved over the exec term that I am especially happy with. The first is introducing fun incentives to the Exam Bank, which re-started student contributions to this important service from basically zero. The second is getting the ball rolling on real changes to PD, by working to convince those who oversee it that concerns exist and showing them what those concerns are. Lastly, I put my all into representation and advocacy, and am confident that more students overall are aware of the decisions in which I was involved than in the past, and had much opportunity to provide input to me. I leave my job in Andrew’s capable hands knowing that I learned a ton in the last 16 months, got to work with these crazy four and would 100% do again!
VP External – Kieran Broekhoven
So a quick wrap of what I’ve spent the last 16 months doing. New stuff: we’ve started doing group trips to the blood drive twice per term, increased awareness of conferences and more charities events throughout the term. Things that I’ve also spent my time on are partnering with an external company for a Hackathon, writing several amendments on our governing documents, better preparing delegates for conferences and bidding (successfully, with the wonderful Ola Suchon) for Waterloo to host the Annual General Meeting of the Engineering Student Societies’ Council of Ontario in May. That’s pretty much how I’ve spent my time! I hope it’s what you hoped for. It’s been a slice, thanks for electing me to such a great 16 months.
VP Finance – Don Tu
When I started as VP Finance, I wanted to really increase the impact and variety of the services that we offer to students. Back then, I saw myself delivering that goal through offering more merchandise through Novelties, growing RidgidWare, and expanding and advertising the Student Deals program. Since then, I (and my wonderful A-Soc counterpart, Abdullah!) have managed to bring some awesome new swag to Novelties (see our new glasses and patches); slowly but surely expand RidgidWare’s inventory and services; and increase the number of Student Deals partners we have in the community. beyond that, I learned how valuable our sponsorship programs (Student Team Sponsorship and ECIF) are to the engineering community at Waterloo. It was very humbling and rewarding to be able to serve engineering students for the past 16 months. Thank you for electing me and my fellow Executives. I hope you had as great of a time as we did!
VP Internal – Teresa Lumini
The last 16 months has been a crazy whirlwind of new things so here is a summary of what I’ve done: introduced hardware skills workshops in the Fall term to add to our array of technical workshops, working with LLC for Resume Critiques, Interview Skills, and Cover Letter Writing Workshops and running them in the Tatham Center, brought back licensing for a few select events without having to put up a barrier between the first years and the licensed area, started a new workshop called University Life 101 and University Life 201 which is a run down of all the things they don’t tell you about surviving here at Waterloo as a human, covering topics like how to do laundry, where to find bus routes, where you can use your watcard for discounts, how to find that work-play balance that they talk about and many more topics to help with the day to day life here, introduced the position of POETS Coordinator to help manage the events that run in POETS. There have been more things but this is most of what I’ve done while serving you as your VP Internal. Thank you for electing me. I hope I have made EngSoc just a little better and thank you for the last 16 months!