Welcome to all new engineering undergrads, and congratulations on your achievements so far. Over the next few years, you will have the opportunity to contribute to all the reasons that made you choose this school, and the Waterloo Engineering Endowment Foundation (WEEF) is one of the best ways to get started.
WEEF was founded by two Waterloo Engineering students, Avi Belinsky and John Vellinga, in 1990 with the goal “to continuously improve the educational environment for undergraduate engineering students, and maintain our outstanding reputation.” Through donations from the student body, employer matching contributions, and alumni, WEEF has accrued over 13 million dollars in principal. This fund is professionally managed and the interest earned is distributed each term to a series of proposals that are evaluated by a student-only council. It is this council for which you will be recruiting two representatives from each of your classes. The representatives will be voted on by the class, and will attend proposal presentations and decision meeting to allocate the funding available.
The presentations will be given by faculty members, student teams, and clubs. As a representative, you will have the chance to see what each faculty is doing with their facilities, what student teams are working on, and what different clubs in the engineering faculty are up to. Faculty (i.e. possibly your professor), staff, and upper year students will be presenting to you. With each class represented, all departments vote on the funding allocation and help guide the University’s funding decisions. Yes, the Engineering departments do take into consideration what students are funding when allocating their own budgets. This is how WEEF gives a strong voice to the students.
Over its 25 years, WEEF has funded many of your lab facilities and supported student teams in their accomplishments. If you see a yellow WEEF sticker on anything in the school, that was funded by a student-only council. Take a look around your labs sometime; there are lots of these stickers. And if you’re planning on joining a student team, you should know that WEEF contributed one million dollars to the construction of E5 and its Student Design Center.
If you enjoy being more involved and better informed about your school, be sure to put your candidacy forward when we visit your class in the next couple of weeks, or contact us at weef@uwaterloo.ca.
Good luck on your academic and professional careers.
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