Oh hai there, didn’t see you (for four months).
I hope you all had a great co-op term, and are super excited for this Spring term! My executive team and I got up to quite a bit over the co-op term and have a lot planned for the next few months. I will try to get as much of that information in here as I can, but as always if you have any questions or concerns, please email me at president.a@engsoc.uwaterloo.ca.
I have had a lot of meetings with the Dean, associate Deans, and many others in order to move forward on some great initiatives. We are currently working toward completely revamping the exam bank by partnering with the departments to have professors submit their exams directly to the Society. Associate Dean Loucks and I are hopeful that can begin sometime this term.
I have been working with Dean Sullivan in the creation of a new leadership scholarship program, which should be made available either this term or next term at the latest. It will be a program that rewards students that show exceptional leadership contributions to the faculty, university and Waterloo community. I have also been working with the Dean to gain access to the entire undergraduate mailing list for important updates, getting more student space in Engineering 7 and about getting our Society fees collected by the faculty.
We have also started an initiative to do a better job of getting student input on important issues, starting with whether or not students would like to see averages on their transcripts. I was very pleased with the turnout, but am quite hopeful we can continue to increase the amount of responses.
As well, we have worked to put a letter from the Society in the confirmation package that incoming students will receive, and are working on creating an Engineering Society textbook library, student deals program and much more. Keep an eye out for more updates on these throughout the term.
At the first EngSoc meeting of the term, our Council approved a few changes to our Bylaws, including adopting a brand new Policy Manual. All of the documents can be found on our website on the documents page. We also started a conversation about changing the way our governing documents work all together. If this is something you are interested in, please be sure to contact me!
I am very excited to work on all of these initiatives, and more, in the upcoming term. I will continue to have meetings about all of these with the associate deans, as well I am being invited to talk at a meeting of the department chairs next month.
If you have anything you would like the Society, or me specifically, to work on, please let me know. We are always looking for ways to better serve the students. If you haven’t already, be sure to join the mailing list, keep an eye out for more surveys (as you will have the chance to win an iPad), and just pop into the EngSoc office any time to say hi!
Don’t be a stranger!
David Birnbaum
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