Hi everyone! I’m Céline, your VP Communications. I focused heavily on external relations over the co-op term, so I’m going to use this update to keep you up-to-date on how I’ve been representing you to other organizations, as well as touching on my plans for the rest of the term.
Since the spring term, I’ve represented Waterloo A-Society at two Canadian Federation of Engineering Students (CFES) conferences. The CFES represents Canadian undergraduate engineering students at a national level to organizations like Engineers Canada, the Accreditation Board, and engineering’s National Council of Deans. This coming year, they will be focusing on advocating to these organizations about the connection between student mental health and heavy workload, in addition to other stances including student input on accreditation and engineering internship quality.
For those of you with an interest in engineering competitions, good news! The CFES is working with American and European engineering student organizations to start the first International Engineering Competition in 2020. And if connecting with students across Canada interests you, but the existing set of CFES conferences isn’t a good fit, keep your eyes peeled for the first Canadian Conference on Sustainability in Engineering, which will be hosted in Prince George, BC, in 2019.
At a provincial level, I’ve been working through ESSCO (the Engineering Student Societies Council of Ontario) to collaborate with other schools on an investigation into the cost of engineering tuition. ESSCO is also hosting the upcoming First-year Integration Conference (FYIC) in Thunder Bay. I’m looking forward to taking eight Waterloo first-years to spend a weekend at Lakehead University developing inter-school connections and leadership experience.
Though I intend to continue working with ESSCO and the CFES on provincial and national advocacy relating to student issues, I’m hoping to spend this term focusing a bit more on internal communications. If you’ve noticed that you get tagged on Facebook in EngSoc photos a bit more often, I hope we’re going in the right direction. I’m hoping to use social media to include as many engineering students as possible in our online image of the society, (and get as many people a nice new profile picture as possible). Thank you to our incredible EngSoc media directors for putting in a lot of work to make this possible! Still don’t have a great profile picture? I suggest making it out to “Unprofessional Photoshoot” on January 26 to get some photos better suited to Facebook than E5 LinkedIn pictures.
Lastly, on January 19, we hosted a PEO Speaker panel with a focus the experience of being an engineer-in-training post-graduation, working towards a P.Eng. If you couldn’t make it out but would like to be connected with PEO or have questions to ask, please reach out to me at vpcomm.a@engsoc.uwaterloo.ca.
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