WEEF Has The Power

During the Fall 2010 term, the A-Society WEEF director Praveen Arichandran hosted a cross-campus endowment meeting where the leaders of each student endowment fund met and compared their organizations. What did we learn from this meeting? Student-run endowment funds have the power! In particular, WEEF has the power to:

• Decide which faculty initiatives are in the highest interest of the student body

• Influence the faculty and university to spend extra money on these initiatives

• Provide support for student teams that boost our school’s reputation. Also, greatly increase the educational experience of students who choose to be involved

• Call-out (and make up for) departments that have may have neglected their undergraduate students’ infrastructure needs

• Increase your department’s infrastructure beyond being simply functional

• Fill the gap where outside funding sources have bailed

More generally WEEF gives undergraduate engineering students the power to take charge of their education. Do you think you’re getting the short end of the stick when it comes to labs? Make your professors and lab technicians submit a WEEF proposal. Personally come to WEEF meetings and decide for yourself where funds are best allocated. You didn’t come to Waterloo for a mediocre education, so let’s make this place better by our own means.

This term WEEF has $60,000 to give out. We will meet three times during the term to decide where the funding goes (dates TBA) and on behalf of you and your classmates, we would really appreciate if you and your classmates would make sure someone from your class attends every meeting.

In other news, the WEEF return period is now open. If you would like to get a return for your $75 donation, follow the link at www.weef.uwaterloo.ca. The deadline for returns is January 24th at 11:59pm. If you are looking to seek funding this term, visit the WEEF website and look for proposal forms. The deadline for proposals is not yet set, but will likely be mid-February.

As a final note and as your WEEF Director, I highly encourage you to get involved with at least one engineering organization this term. Come to a WEEF meeting; go to a student team lunch; talk to your engineering society executives; really just do anything at all that will improve your education. At the end of the day, when you try to make your personal education here better, you improve everyone’s education, which indirectly makes your educational experience better. Am I off-topic? Just remember that WEEF is one of your voices within the Faculty and we would really appreciate your opinions and perspectives this term.

Thanks for reading,

Graham Stonebridge
weef@engmail.uwaterloo.ca