As this is my second last Iron Warrior article I am going to take a page of out our past president David Birnbaum’s book and recount something that is very difficult to speak about publicly, that is, my failures as a President. You may wonder why I would write an article about this or even why you should read it but to me it will be one of the most important articles I will write. I was elected on a set of platform points and promised students certain things. Some of these I am proud to say I accomplished, but there are also many that I unfortunately failed in providing to you, the students. I hope that with this article I can emphasize accountability as well as holding the Executive responsible for their failures as well as their accomplishments.
The first and main objective that I am disappointed I was not able to accomplish during my tenure as President was a syllabus bank. This has been a long-standing request from students and would be a new beneficial service we could offer. Though I made some headway in the Fall term, things dropped off in the Winter and I was never able to claim the same momentum that I had in the Fall to get approval from the Faculty. I apologize to those who sent me syllabuses with the hope that they would be published while they were still in school. We still have all of them on file and I sincerely hope that the effort and the push continues until we have succeeded in implementing the bank.
Another larger area that I personally believe I have failed in is running the Engineering Society Council. While on the surface it may look like we have accomplished a lot with the diversity policy and the executive review committee, I have failed in terms of cultivating a council who truly cares about the role of Council and understands its importance. In my attempt to move away from the circular and endless discussion of the past, I went too far and we now have a Council that is governed by the Executive and rarely actively disagrees with motions. This was not my intention in the slightest and I’m not even sure how it actually happened. To try to correct some of my mistakes we have started the plan to implement a council review committee to try and make changes to Council. In addition it is my hope that once the current Executive finish we can still attend meetings and start the discussion on motions again and help the first years re-understand the importance of Council.
The last of my many failures I would like to address is external relationships. Following David I knew that I did have many bridges to rebuild but I came in confident and optimistic that I could rebuild them. However I can’t say that our relationship with the Federation is much better than it was when he was President (whether or not that is a good or bad thing is up for debate) and A-Society and B-Society are no more similar than they were when I started. Some of these were because I wasn’t willing to compromise on my opinions and part of this was because I stopped putting in the effort to rebuild the relationship. This is a case where we need to keep chipping away at the wall between us and others and start playing nice.
There are many more things I would like to address, but I have reached my word limit. If you think there are other things that you disliked about my role as a President I encourage you to share them with the new Executive team so that they can learn from my mistakes.
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