Hi everyone and welcome back to another term! I hope everyone had a great co-op term. In my first executive update this term, I wanted to go over my plans for my last four months as VP Education and a little bit about co-op. A couple of these are continuing from the fall, while a few are new things that have recently come up.
First up, let’s talk about Waterloo Works. I’ve been meeting with a number of different folks within CECA and seem to have made some progress on getting the dialogue with students improved. That being said, I can confirm a few things. First, it is delayed indefinitely for performance reasons. However, IST has run performance tests on the new hardware and it has performed as expected. My best estimate at this point is that we’ll see Waterloo Work next year, but I have not received any dates from CECA. Please hang tight, and expect a lot more information to be flowing about the project in the coming weeks.
Next up are Work Term Reports. The faculty recently passed changes to the overall work term report guidelines that lets programs create their own work term report courses. These new courses must follow some very specific guidelines in terms of content, credit weight, etc. I will be working to send out a survey in the coming weeks to get some general feedback on Work Term Reports so that we can ensure students have a say in these potentially new courses.
Third is academic reps. I’m going to be holding an all-academic reps meeting later in the term. This meeting will have some guest speakers from organizations within the university that more fit the portfolio of academic reps versus EngSoc reps. I will also be reaching out to the individual program reps to hold program specific meetings to get some more information about the positives and negatives in each program.
Last up is a little update on something I have been working on with Chemical Engineering. In the fall I proposed running a number of surveys and focus groups with Chemical Engineering students to help the department understand what students’ expectations are for co-op. This idea has evolved a bit and I’ve handed it off to the department. They will be running these with both students and employers to try to figure out if there is a missing piece with co-op employment. I hope this leads to long-term improvements to Chemical Engineering co-op numbers and the program as well.
There are lots of other things I could go into, but I’ve hit my word count for this issue. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns or just want to talk about education related things fire me an email at vpeducation.a@engsoc.uwaterloo.ca. Best of luck with the co-op hunt and I’ll be back in two weeks.
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