Hello, and welcome to the next best years of your life! Orientation week is a crazy blur, but hopefully you will remember some of the things you learned and the amazing times you had. Let us introduce ourselves! We are Leila and Kristina, and are your VP Externals for the year! Kristina is here in the fall term and Leila will be here in the winter term. The VP EX is responsible for many different things within the Society including charities, outreach, external representation and the Waterloo Engineering Competition. We will explain some of the activities involved in each of those in the rest of this article, but the best way to find out more is to come out and talk to us about the ways you can get involved! We promise we won’t bite!
Charities are something very near and dear to our hearts. We run many charity events throughout the term and donate all of the money to a charity of EngSoc’s choice. Charities we have supported in the past have included Free the Children, Canadian Cancer Society, and the Nation Service Dogs. If charities is your thing, you will definitely want to check out some of our more popular events like the charity head shave, purpling for charity, charity pancakes, charity bottle drives and so much more!
Another major role the VP External plays is making sure everyone gets their volunteer fix and the chance to get out in the community and show their engineering pride while giving back. In the fall term, we march alongside the rest of Waterloo in the Santa Claus parade; in the winter term, we pull a bus all the way to Kitchener to raise money; and in the summer term, we organize a group to go to march in the Toronto Pride parade to help raise awareness for the diversity in engineering. All of this, in addition to smaller outreach events, is how Waterloo engineers show how much they care.
In addition to charities and outreach, the VP external also represents Waterloo to the Engineering Student Societies Council of Ontario (ESSCO) and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFES) councils. We voice the opinion of Waterloo students, exchange ideas, and meet engineering students from all across Canada. There are opportunities for every student to participate by attending conferences. A great conference for first years is the First Year Integration Conference in February, which is going to be in Ottawa this year! You’ll get the chance to be inspired to become leaders in the Engineering Societies while making friends with students from every Ontario school. Keep your eyes open for applications starting in November.
Lastly, if design and competition is your passion, then the Waterloo Engineering Competition is for you! Each fall and summer term, teams of four compete to solve challenging design problems for the chance to compete at the Ontario and Canadian Engineering Competitions later in the year.
We are so excited to meet all of you and make your time here as fantastic as ours is!!
Thanks and see you soon!
Leave a Reply