It’s that stage in the term when first round of WaterlooWorks is coming to a close, midterms are finishing, and the future becomes a hotter topic than the panic that normally engulfs all of us. What’s my approach to all of this? Attempting to be strategic, I guess. Every once in awhile, someone will say to me “how do you have your life so together?”. Well first thing – I don’t. There’s moments of success now and then like when I mopped the kitchen floor because it was bugging me or I did meal prep that one time or I got the interview I was really hoping for – but trust me when I say that I’m struggling just as much as everyone else here. I visit Engineering Counseling on the regular, I time block every moment of my life, and I make a lot of hard choices to choose school or work over what I really want to do. I call this all part of my “strategy” – over time, I’ve come to understand what I need. Am I right or doing everything the most efficiently? Probably not, but I think I’m doing my best. When I’m on-term, those three things – counseling, time-blocking, and hard choices are the three pillars of my life strategic plan. You’re probably thinking: “Rachel where are you actually going with this though?”
Well, as always, everything comes back to EngSoc. In a position where your role is your lifestyle, you end up drawing a lot of weird parallels. I’ve mentioned in one of my previous articles that I’m working with all of Executive (both A and B) to develop the Society’s first Long Term Strategic Plan. Why is this important? A couple reasons. EngSoc is constantly transitioning, with two Society’s consisting of two sets of Executive that change every 16 months, it’s difficult to follow through with a lot of initiatives. If you reference the archived EngSoc articles – you’ll likely find that this is the case for every Executive team. How will a strategic plan help though? A strategic plan is meant to offer a guideline for Executive for a prescribed amount of time. When the prescribed amount of time is over – the plan is reassessed. The strategic plan should be passed by council because it sets a precedence for what students believe are important to them. What sort of information goes into a strategic plan? The strategic plan is divided into a few sections based on Executive’s understanding of the current student needs. As always the document begins with an introduction and reminds readers of the mission and vision of our organization (EngSoc). The introduction includes the purpose and intention of the document. The introduction is followed by the areas that we want to strategically improve. Executive have currently identified 3 areas – Organization, Services & Representation, and Student Life – which yes does include basically all that we do! ~continuous improvement~
If this sounded at all remotely interesting to you, or you’ve wondered “what does the Engineering Society actually even do though?” Come out to Council 3 where we will be reviewing the document and voting on the content. Everyone is welcome to attend on Wednesday, November 1st at 5:30 pm in RCH 301!
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