Around one year ago, a motion was put forward to Engineering Society B asking them to look over the current workload of the executive and see if their portfolios were still relevant due to the ever changing ecosystem of Engineering. Our size has grown immensely and new opportunities have been placed under the executive that seemed to fit best at the time and never seem to be re-evaluated.
A committee was formed to look into this, but came to the conclusion that this was a much bigger issue that needed input from both societies and a great deal of time to think of all of the possibilities. The committee was struck at a special joint council meeting which was called for this specific reason during frosh week. The committee was selected by the council and its members included Tim Bandura (A-Soc Prez), Scott Rankin (B-Soc Prez), Alessia Danelon and Michael Seliske from A-Soc and Spencer McEwan and Jessica Friesen from B-Soc. This committee met a few times throughout the term, but various location based difficulties caused the committee to continue into the winter term. They exhausted all options for dealing with the Executive’s workload and also brainstormed what they thought the Executive should be doing and what they are doing currently.
It was the opinion of the committee that the Executive of the Engineering Society should be dealing with overall society matters such as future planning, ensuring student development and being the voice of students to various groups around the school, community and country. The current executives were asked to identify their daily routines and it was made clear that much of their time is spent on housekeeping matters which don’t necessarily have to be undertaken by an executive.
It was one of the original proposals to have a sixth executive who would be able to take some of the work away from certain other executives which would in turn help the society accomplish more. This approach was carefully considered but whenever it was discussed, the same alternative solution continued to surface.
The idea of “Super Directors” was not a new idea and had been kicked around a lot and was something that has worked at other schools. At Queen’s, it works well for them and since we are a growing society, we need to properly scale to meet the needs of the students. After a lot of discussion, the committee developed a basic outline of what they propose the EngSoc structure should look like. This structure would be put in place to ensure that the Exec had time to deal with overall society planning instead of helping with the day to day operations. The committee feels that this new Super Directorship structure will allow the day to day stuff to be run by awesome volunteers and the planning and representation to be done by the Exec.
Tune in next issue to hear about each proposed tier in more detail and a complete hierarchy!
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