By Sasha Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 24, 2012
Sophie Thomas (far left in above picture) is the president of the Sociology Anthropology Undergraduate Society (SAUS).
So, tell me is it pronounced SAUS [as in, spaghetti sauce] or SAUS [rhyming with house]?
It’s actually SAUS [as in spaghetti sauce].
I actually like that better.
Yeah, I think the SAUS [rhyming with house] thing started with Chris from the Student Union Society (SUS). He said that that is what he was going to call us.
So, it’s the Sociology Anthropology Undergraduate Society. Are you guys pretty well established, as an association?
We actually started March of 2012. So we’re very recent. We have some key players in SAUS, primarily the SAUS board members, who are absolutely integral to moving forward in the way we have. We’ve had a huge amount of support from the instructors from the department and so that has really helped us.
And you guys are combined from two different disciplines?
Yeah . . . We’re sort of embedded in this umbrella of SCMS (Social, Cultural and Media Studies) which some students find they don’t like it, they find we’re largely overlooked in the school, and many students don’t even know we have a Sociology-Anthropology discipline. Whereas other students, they’re really happy that we have all of that because we’re having cross discipline work, so interdisciplinary work.
So how did SAUS come to be – how do students get involved with SAUS?
What had happened was Darren Blakeborough, I believe it was, had approached students with the idea that MACS (Media and Communication studies) should have a student association, so that actually got off the ground a little earlier than we did. But that’s what sparked the idea . . . and we sort of went, “well wait a second, that’s actually an excellent idea [for Sociology and Anthropology students as well] . . . and if we can put together enough motivated students, we should start that too.” And one of our goals, through creating the association, was providing the students the opportunity to run their own events, or to access academic conferences or key speakers, things like that, to open up those kinds of opportunities.
Do students running their own events have to get involved on the board, or could they approach you guys?
The board is pretty much there essentially to interface with instructors or students, SUS, that kind of stuff. So they just keep kind of like the paperwork together, and then we have all sorts of other students just to come out of interest. So we have an event that’s coming up where one of the students wanted to have a Skype session with a woman in Toronto to talk about careers available to Sociology students, and that’s such a fantastic idea. So as the board members we were able to book the necessary rooms or in other cases apply for the necessary funding, so that’s kind of what the board functions to do; apply structure to the events and make sure they happen.
And what would a student have to do to get on the board, just say they wanted to be vice-president or something – or do you guys have a VP position?
We actually do – well kind of. What we’ve done is structured it so that we have two president positions, and the idea behind that is there is an anthropology president, which is the position that I hold, and then we have a Sociology president . . . We are actually looking to fill our Sociology president position, it’s been vacant since the student that held it graduated. For people that are interested, they need to have completed 60 credits, have declared their major in Sociology and start routinely coming to our meetings and get an idea of who we are and what our goals are. After December, our secretary position will also be vacant due to Caity Therrien graduating.
Okay, so future events – what have you guys have planned for this year?
We just finished out first major event – the Get SAUSed with SAUS pub night which was a real success, and have a couple things coming up . . . we’re joining SOLAR and running a Garibaldi hike in Squamish on November 10. We’re also doing a Q&A Skype session with a woman out of Toronto . . . and that’ll be focusing on careers in Sociology. We also have a movie night, which we are still working out the details for. We want to do something fun – less serious than our last movie night. My vote is Billy Connolly’s trip across Canada in AfterMath but we’ll see how that turns out.
We are also running a mini conference on March 6, [2013]. And that’ll be for all social science students. It’ll be a poster conference, and then we’ll have a mini lecture series so students will have a chance to practice doing a 10 to 15 minute talk on their research as well, and for that we a panel of judges made up of instructors from various disciplines. The primary function of it is to provide students with the opportunity to—in a comfortable environment—practice presenting their research posters and presenting and answering questions from the instructors.
Cool. Is there anything else you’d want students to know?
Well we actually have weekly meetings. It would be really nice to see more students come out to that so we can start getting a better idea about what all of the students would like in terms of events, what we could put on to engage students a bit more. I think it’s important for students to get involved in their students’ associations, just for the opportunities that it provides you in terms of going to conferences or opening up research opportunities with different instructors, you know even just chatting about a paper that you’re kind of stuck on. So it really does benefit students to come out and take advantage of the students’ associations.
SAUS board meetings are on Thursdays at 4 p.m. in AfterMath. The next meeting is on November 1.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
