Current area of study: Bachelor of Science Biology Major, pre-medicine concentration.
Experience: ESports Valley Public Relations Manager, 2014 – present; UFV Advocacy for Men and Boys, 2016 – present; Equalities Committee Member, 2016; SUS Volunteer 2014 – present.
What are you hoping to accomplish as VPI?
I personally believe that the vice president internal portfolio is fairly black and white, there’s not really a whole lot of room to expand on the responsibility. However, there are some inefficiencies or problems with the system that I hope to work on, and I’m not trying to tackle the symptoms, I’m trying to tackle the overarching disease, which is the fact that we A) don’t really have a platform for effectively communicating to students, B) we don’t regularly update the website, and C) the vice president internal needs to be constantly contacting people to keep on top of really the contact we have with all of clubs and associations. So what I hope to accomplish is a lot of ways of improving the efficiencies of the Student Union Society. I want to have clear minutes from the board meetings, I want the budget to be balanced carefully and for it to be looked over on a regular basis, and I want more communication with clubs and associations.
Is there anything that SUS has done in that past that you would have done differently?
Yes, but it’s not a type of criticism necessarily, more to say that I as an individual would have done things differently. My caveat is that while I’d love to answer questions like this about my personal preferences, my goal in office is not to sort of be king for a day. Ultimately what I hope to do as a representative is to be the voice of students rather than enact by own personal biased in the Student Union Society. But for something very specific in recent memory, I remember them saying that the condom dispensers were going to be installed sometime quite early like December or January, and it’s several months later and we’ve heard nothing about it. I probably would have been a little more transparent about why it took so long and the breakdown in communication there.
How are you planning to improve communication with the student body?
Actually, I have a couple of ideas on that and I really need to look into the feasibility if I’m ever put into office, but there are three major ways that I want to improve communication with the student body. I would like there to be a more active Facebook presence because that seems to be where a lot of students are engaged, so if at all possible, similar to what I’m doing in ESports Valley, I would like to run a very active social media profile. In addition, I would like to update the myUFV platform so that it’s A) more user friendly and B) it can be used to gather metrics from the student body. What I mean by that, we already do the student elections through myUFV, but we don’t really use it for anything else when we could be using it to poll on certain things: What do you think the Student Union Building should be used for? What do you want to see out of the Student Union Society? By collecting those types of metrics online we could better use them to serve the student body. In terms of communication, I want to ask students what they want more often, I want to have a social media profile that encourages people to communicate, and then of course if we could do some in-person events where you can speak with the elected officials and you can speak with people from SUS I think it would be really good to maintain not only an online presence but a physical presence on campus as well.
Are there any specific policies or bylaws you are wanting to change?
I know it’s kind of a broad answer, but what I hope to do is hopefully, if I was on payroll and not before then, I would want to look through all of the policies we have and eliminate anything that is deadweight. Because right now no students really go through the policy, no students really have any idea of how the Student Union Society operates. What I would like to do is make it legible, I would want to make it accessible to the student body so that they actually understand how things work, anything that’s outdated that we don’t need eliminated. And then clarify the rest of the policy. It’s a very general answer to that, I would like to do some housekeeping on the ones that need clarification or that don’t need to be there.
Any last remarks?
To touch on what I said earlier, to me, it is very important that the student body elects someone who is going to represent their best interest and at the upcoming debate there’s going to be a lot of questions about what would you do about the women’s centre, what would do about this, and what would you do about this, but my goal as a representative is not to be king for a day, it’s really, not about what I would do, I want to hear the voice of the student body and act upon that instead. So my goals as VPI are to represent students, not my own interests.
