WEEF Report: Funding Council Decisions are In!

Hi everyone,

On Monday the 7th the funding council got together and decided where we would allocate this term’s sixty thousand dollars. The decision was tough, as over $300,000 had been requested. While we could have just given each group 1/5th of what they requested, we really tried to make sure that our decision had the greatest impact on the widest variety of engineering students.

This meant that some groups received no funding while other groups received near-full funding. To anyone who didn’t receive funding, the council wants to express that we don’t necessarily disapprove of your projects. We fully encourage you to resubmit your proposal in the summer term.

One debate we had during our meeting was deciding whether we should give the Chem Eng fourth year server less funding so that we could give the Nano fourth year study room some computer terminals. Giving the Nanos some computers would have been great – they currently have a total of zero computers in their study room, unlike other departments that have upwards of ten. Our final consensus, however, was that the Nanos (as well as the Chems) would benefit more from being able to run better simulations on a lightning-fast server than they would from being able to access a weaker server from the comfort of their study room.

The question that always comes up is whether we are being completely fair to every department and to the undergraduate population as a whole. Spock says, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs [or rights] of the few.” While this is usually true, the educational impact of smaller projects is sometimes higher than that of the larger organizations. Finding a balance between these two arguments is where WEEF finds both its stress and its satisfaction.

I’ve attached the funding council’s decisions for Winter 2011. Some groups have stipulations that go along with their allocations. For example the Chem Eng server will be accessible by all fourth year nanos and the Rocketry team will not purchase fuel with their funding. Additionally, the numbers you see are unofficial until approved by the Board of Directors on March 23rd.

Please say thanks to your class’s WEEF reps who did a superb job this term of being logical, informed, outspoken and not annoying during our meetings.