Hi all! I hope the past few weeks have been treating you well. A lot of major events have wrapped up for this term and there are many ideas for the future. I’m still working on transitioning my role as VP Academic over to my successor Thomas Dedinsky. Hopefully future VP Academics will be able to take the lessons I’ve learned and improve in the future.
Resume Rescue
Can you believe Resume Rescue is turning 2 years old and it is time to re-evaluate the service? The service has constant usage and, in the future, it will require more operational support. Another part of my investigations have shown that there are numerous places engineering students can and do get their resume critiques as a part of an ongoing system. Some concerns for the future are the overlap, and thus some inefficiencies, of how resources are being used.
Co-op Fee
There is currently no update from CECA about the co-op fee and I am continually contacting them, as well as the FEDS VP Education, with requests for updates. I am worried that, because some of the controversial petitions have ended and student interest has died down a bit, the push for transparency from the student body isn’t as strong as it was at the beginning of the term.
Career Fair
Career Fair went smoothly and I hope that it continues to grow as an event in the future. The directorship team had a lot to learn in terms of executing a multi-faceted event. There is, thankfully, now a lot more email, google form, and external contact infrastructure that will likely make running and planning next year’s event a lot easier. One piece of reflection was to reach out to more companies and organizations in the future, and prioritize those that can appeal to a wide variety of programs and types of engineering application not just limited to traditional technical work.
This year’s career fair also marks the first event that OSPE, (the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers) has attended in addition to PEO, (Professional Engineers of Ontario). While each organization influences different aspects of engineering, both organization have student and new graduate programs and resources, so I encourage everyone to check them out!
Future Workshop Ideas
Shout out to the Tax Filing Workshop Part 1 that had a solid attendance in early March, and Ben Moir’s work in developing and running that event. Tax Filing Workshop:Part 2, How to Fill in Canadian Taxes is happening on Tuesday, Mar 20!
In the future, I’d like to see more widely applicable workshops, like the ones ran this term. Some ideas include workshops on the layout/deciding content of FYDP posters, communicating engineering ideas to non engineering people, how to fill out PEO pre-graduation experience forms, and perhaps more collaborations with external employers/organizations.
Have thoughts/opinions/concerns on the topics above? Or anything academic/co-op related ? My office hours are Fridays 11:30 am – 1:20 pm in the Orifice or drop me an email at vpacademic.a@engsoc.uwaterloo.ca. Cheers!
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