Spring 2012 Funding Decisions!

Well hello there reader. I see that you have tuned in for the final WEEF article, and boy do we have a lot in store for you!

First off, the Spring 2012 funding decisions have been made by our wonderful Funding Council and can be seen in the attached table. This term we had $130,000 officially requested, and only $60,000 to hand out. We were extremely happy to see such a large range of proposals this term. After two evenings of proposal presentations from all engineering areas, the Funding Council sat down to hash everything out. The council went through several rounds of debate (and dinner!) before reaching its final decision. The results were pretty fantastic. We were able to exactly reach the target Department-Student Teams funding split of 70%-30%; a first for this director’s term. In addition, we were able to provide complete funding for half of the fourteen Department proposals. This type of full funding will have a very significant and immediate impact on the laboratory and hand-on aspects of UW undergraduate programming. Finally, a significant amount was allocated to student teams, so they can continue to design and innovate on behalf of UW Engineering. These allocations will not become official until voted upon by the WEEF Board of Director’s on Monday, July 23, 2012.

For those who did not get their desired funding this term, I encourage you to apply during Fall 2012, when more funding will be available. The proposal pool is different each term, which means that your proposal can still receive funding in the future.

I would like to thank all the members of the Funding Council for being diligent and willing to ask the hard questions this term. Thanks to your work, we can all be confident in the many destinations of our WEEF money.

Secondly, the refund results are in, which you can also see  in the accompanying figure. This term, 84.2% of enrolled, on-stream students contributed to WEEF through their Voluntary Student Contribution (VSC). And we thank you! Please take a look at the funding results to see how your contributions are being felt across campus. WEEF is an extremely valuable tool for a huge number of initiatives across UW engineering, and it would not be nearly as strong and successful without you! Specifically, I would like to thank the 1B Geological class for being the only class with an impressive 100% contribution rate this term. You rock! *pun alert*. For the other 15.8%, I’ll meet you at the flagpole after the bell …

The final order of business this term is a goodbye. Thank you for allowing me to have this amazing role for the past two terms. It has been a great experience being involved in WEEF, being exposed to all the great work going on at our university, and helping to keep the WEEF-mobile running smoothly. I would like to thank my assistant directors over the terms for making my job easy, and the past, present and future WEEF directors for keeping me in line. I wish Keegan all the best in his upcoming terms as WEEF Director, and remember: WEEF IS GOOD!

Questions or comments for WEEF? Visit weef.ca or email weef@uwaterloo.ca.

***Editor note: Include tables and graphs when finished***