EngSoc

What’s Council anyway?: The Chronicles of Council (no Aslan, sorry)

WE MADE IT! Maybe? For those of you done midterms, congratulations! I hope you all had a great “reading” week. We’re halfway through the term now, and lots of initiatives have been rolling out by the Executive. On the Council side of things, we had two jam-packed meetings! From FEDS, to WaterlooWorks mandates, and committee after committee, this article is going to break it down for you!

In meeting 1, we passed a lot of routine motions, like the budget for the term, and electing students to sit on the EngSoc Leadership Excellence Award Committee and Teaching Excellence Awards Committee. A new committee was formed to assist the VP Communications in selecting delegates for conferences, and to remove any bias from these selections. We hope that this committee will become a new standard for EngSoc!

We also passed a motion to establish brand guidelines for the Society. Melissa, the VP Communications, will be working on this over the term and we’ll have it posted to the website for easy access! Finally, at meeting 1, Council was in full agreement that AT LEAST 1 Executive will volunteer to participate in charity pi day by getting pie’d in the face. Make sure you visit the CPH foyer on March 14th to see who you can pie!

Now onto meeting 2! The FEDS Executive candidates had an opportunity to share their platform with Council. By the time you read this, the successful candidates will have been elected. I encourage you to get informed about their initiatives and support transparency and accountability!

Just like in meeting 1, meeting 2 began with many routine motions including the election of the Sponsorship Committee, election of a Chief Feedback Officer, and the rollover motions from the A-Society term. Whenever a big change happens that affects how the Society operates or our governing documents are changed, the motion needs to be passed on both parts of the Society. The results of these motions will include a combined mentorship program in the future (Women in Engineering and EngSoc), and remote attendance (for all of us on co-op) at our Joint Annual General Meeting this Spring.

The VP Academic, Andrew, was also mandated to conduct a survey and write a letter to CECA regarding WaterlooWorks. Stay tuned for that survey as we’ll be looking to gather as much data as possible.

Finally, the Dikcissel now joins the Dikdik (EngSoc’s official animal) as the official bird of the Society (Google them, they’re both pretty cute).

If any of this sounds interesting to you, and you’d like to take part in these discussions, I’d highly recommend attending Council! We still have 3 meetings left this term (March 1st, 15th, and 29th) and I hope to see you there!

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