Reflections of a Former Engineering Society Executive

There are lots of Faculty who genuinely wish to help

One of my biggest surprises as VP-Education has been the number of faculty I’ve encountered who do recognize our problems and are genuinely working to address them. Sometimes, it is just not clear how to go about solving a given problem without introducing new ones. Sometimes faculty with an outwardly gruff exterior can actually be very understanding if you explain your situation clearly and honestly (they’ve seen enough students to know a lie when they see one). Similarly, certain professors have been in academia so long they can forget what it is like to be a student, and since they are usually pretty smart, most of them have a lot of trouble relating to struggling students. This doesn’t mean you should give up-it just means you should do everything you can to be clear, try and get them to see your side, and make it easy for them to help you (tell you exactly what you need).

Undergraduates will never be the top priority

Universities do research. Colleges are designed solely to help their students find jobs. Universities, on the other hand, have a great variety of different objectives and not all of them involve us. The performance part of a faculty pay is 40% research, 40% teaching and 20% service (like committees and such). My understanding is that this is actually not bad relative to other universities. However, in terms of promotions and other accolades, there is often a bias toward profs who have strong research backgrounds. This is true of almost all North American Universities-remember that universities are designed to advance the scientific understanding of society as a whole and undergraduate teaching will remain only as a part of that.

The process is slow, but it does work

When a new policy is proposed, there are a number of committees and boards it must go through before something comes into force. However, this can occasionally work to our advantage. While students are always a small minority, the administration- and especially the senate- is disinclined to push something if there is fierce student opposition. A particularly memorable example is the attempt to shorten frosh week. A less well-known example is when Engineering pushed to have a default late penalty (when unspecified by the professor) of a 0%. Though I convinced my fellow students to vote against it, our six votes weren’t sufficient to defeat it. However, I was able to communicate this to then-senator Jay Shah, and even though Senate could have pushed it through without student support, the motion was defeated due largely to student opposition. Students often forget that we are welcome to introduce policies at various levels in the process. While the process is designed for changes to come from faculty/administration, this does not mean it is impossible for students. A good example is a policy supporting midterm relief for students which I just managed to have approved at the Undergraduate Operations Committee and hope to present at Senate Undergraduate Council next month.

Tuition fees will continue to rise, barring major governmental policy changes

Faculty and staff receive both a cost-of-living and a performance component of their annual raises. This usually works out to be greater than inflation. Especially in services like Co-op, where salaries are such a huge component of their costs, this means costs will rise at a pace greater than inflation. Therefore, UW, like most, if not all, universities in Ontario (and North America), is going to raise their fees basically by however much the government will allow them (the government does mandate caps). Barring a lowering or freeze of their cap (which would likely only come with a major shift in government spending) and barring sustained salary freezes and/or reductions (a sort of freeze actually did occur due to the recession, but this is somewhat rare), real tuition fees will continue to rise.

Ultimately, we must be accountable for our own education

Two of the biggest components of my portfolio were Professional Development and Co-op. One of the major motivations originally for PD was employer demand: the feeling that Waterloo students are gifted academically but do not have the professional skills expected of them. This is partly because no matter how gifted a person is academically; they can still be a jerk. The new PD courses are a huge improvement by teaching interesting and valuable stuff, but ultimately being professional is up to us. Similarly, it is easy to complain that Co-op is not finding enough jobs, but if you have little to no volunteer/work experience, poor marks and have chosen a program without a lot of employment, there is only so much Co-op can do for you. While we are paying UW to help facilitate learning and expose us to ideas and skills, the most important lessons will be driven from within.