Category Archives: Sauder

The Hipster-Hack Matrix

To go with your a.m. selection: Introducing the matrix of all matrixes, The Hipster-Hack Matrix.  Literal eons in the making, we’re not even kidding, this may just be the next BCG matrix (don’t know what that is? #sauderfail). So hold on to your down-belows, take a deep breath and let’s dive in.

 

The matrix is divided into four quadrants based on the candidates’ relative hipster and hack tendencies. But old person, you say, what’s a hack? Basically, student politics is a giant, often quirky, sometimes weird and always insular clique. The more you are involved in student government, the more you’re a hack—and that can be good or bad.

So, are you involved (good) or have you totally lost sight of the average student experience (bad)? To help you determine which candidate best meets your hip-hack needs, we’ve gone ahead and positioned everyone on the scale for your viewing (and voting!) pleasure.

This post brought to you by The Confidential Team—mostly Ekat. As always, all statistics on this blog are made up. We’re sorry; we know some of you are engineers.

FuckYeahNumbers – CUSElections AfterMATH

* Also, a quick something on Sauder secret building monies (oOOOooohh). Read about that and more after the break.

As a former/current math nerd, there’s nothing that gets me more excited than being able to throw numbers and statistics around and feel important. It’s like a second Christmas, except instead of bits of shredded wrapping paper flying through the air, it’s percentages and … other math things flying through the air. You can only imagine the intense feelings I have towards Pie R Squared.

GREATEST PUN EVER MADE

To be fair, though, Sauder has a LOT of good looking and sexy numbers to throw around this year:

Continue reading

The Sauder One-Week Referendum Challenge

On Sunday, the CUS announced they would be having a referendum to iron out a few kinks in their constitution, which they passed just a few years ago, back in 2008. Normally, this wouldn’t be really super-big news, and it isn’t, but it looks like they’re going to try and pull it all off in JUST ONE WEEK!

Why such a hurry? Well, in order for some of the changes to take affect (namely, a smaller Board of Directors), they have to get it passed BEFORE their next election, which is also in a week. In fact, voting has actually been pushed back and shortened for a day in order for people to hold the referendum vote first.

On Monday night at the All Candidates Meeting, Senator Chad Embree appealed to all candidates to include the referendum in their campaigns, to try and make this miracle happen. There hasn’t been any referendum campaigning action yet (since everything seems to be happening on Facebook. Sauder = Sustainable). In order to pass the referendum, there has to be 10% of Sauder’s 2700 undergrads voting with over 2/3 voting yes. So, if my Commerce math is correct, that means they’ll have to campaign as hard as …… any of the candidates in the AMS Elections. Even the ones who no one has heard of and lost by a landslide.

Which is still more than no campaigning, mind you, Sauder.

So we’ve started campaigning for you!
Come to our totally serious facebook group here!

Where did all the Commerce go?

You all know what a Commerce student is. Even though their new, expensive building keeps them oh-so-exclusive and they’re dwarfed in sized by Science and Arts, you’ve seen them around. There’s at least one of them running that club you’re in and they’re always click-click-clicking away on their Blackberries and Macbooks, dreaming of fast cars and fast money.

So where did they all go? With Ben Cappellacci’s recent resignation from the BoG race, the only Sauder-ite left running for office this year is Michael Moll, who’s a fresh face to AMS politics. His “experience” consists of being 2nd year and 3rd year rep at Commerce and a “business blog” that reminds us of a certain boring Owl. His platform is literally “The AMS should be more like the CUS”. Way to represent, Moll.

Last year’s Commerce candidates were filled with big names like Bijan (joint MBA/Law and bijan.ca), J Rebane (Kicking it with Pedobear), Ekat (a Foxtrot Fox) and Stas Pavlov (writes for these guys). There were seven Commerce candidates last year and almost all of them got elected!

(Interesting sidenote: the only candidate who beat a Commerce student last year was Jeremy McElroy, so look out, Moll!)

What did we do wrong, Sauder; what did we do?

So UBC, show those Commerce kiddies that you still care! Get out your boomboxes and your mix tapes and stand outside those Henry Angus windows! Better yet, maybe pretend to care about their upcoming CUS elections, which I hear some of the above names are running in.

Because underneath their Globe and Mail newspapers and cheap suits,
there beats a heart that wants to be loved. <3

(Bored by a post without any pictures? Don’t worry, our endorsements are going up REEAAAAL soon.

Don’t forget to show US some love, too, and vote for us for Voter-Funded Media funding!)

Your Sporadic Dose of News for Noobs

Long time no post! We won more moniez, Taylor is back (with less memes and more sparkles), people are storming some goddamn wall on campus, Gossip Girl aired, and it’s almost summer. Here’s a rundown of what is happening/a bunch of rumours in the sextacular AMS.

Secrets, secrets are no fun…

AMS Council had some super secret location discussing some super secret things where the sexy media isn’t allowed. We speculate that half of the meeting will be spent discussing strategies on how to become as popular in the UBC world as Justin Bieber & Perez Hilton are in the real world.

yes, taylor’s back… (her idols at perez’s birthday a few days ago)

After the jump we have some sexy Toope, the no alcohol at Koerner’s shit, and a clusterfuck of AMS rumours…

Continue reading

Guest Post: Little Spoon Sounds Off

In the spirit of what appears to be the new modus operandi for constituency coverage, we’re pleased to bring you a guest post about something we know nothing about: The CUS Referendum (previous article on the subject here). Our guest blogger is a most notable Sauder student (a ‘Saudi,’ if you will), the owner of one impeccable black suit, and a heckuva lady.

Let’s face it—the halls of Henry Angus are abuzz with talk of this building referendum. Walk into the Sauder building and you’re bound to find people in little “ask me!” t-shirts, eyes glazed over from lack of sleep and willing to tell you all the amazing things that will happen in phase two and beyond—all you have to do is vote yes.

FACT #1—VOTE INFORMED…OBVIOUSLY: Let’s be frank here. I’m not going to tell you how to vote, or think, or act. I’m not going to discount cash flows and show fancy graphs and numbers as there are plenty of other blogs doing that. I’m going to tell it like it is, clear and simple, for people that want some sort of honesty before they hit the polls. Chances are though, if you’re a Sauder keener, you’ve already voted. But if not, perhaps you should continue to read this and maybe even comment below, because when all is said and done, it’s really about two things: value and principle.

FACT #2—THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A TUITION INCREASE AND NOT A STUDENT FEE: When it comes to a student fee, you need to get it voted in by a referendum, convince students to vote yes and achieve quorum, convince the AMS to ratify the referendum results, bring it to UBC’s BoG and then hope to God that the Province doesn’t shoot it down. Sound like a lot of work? Well, it is, and if by some chance all goes well, the funds flow in a rather complicated way: to UBC to the AMS and back to UBC. EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. Money is lost because of handling fees and admin time and quite frankly, it just doesn’t make sense. The reason for this is a tuition cap by the provincial government, and because of this freeze, institutions are finding creative ways of upping the price. This whole building debacle is the equivalent of you going to the back door of the Pit because you didn’t want to stand in line and paying the bouncer, then getting caught by the manager and having to pay him too.

FACT #3—THOSE WHO TRULY BENEFIT FROM THIS ARE THE SAUDER “SUPER ELITE”: There are Sauder students, and then there are the crazy, super-involved, future CEO Sauder students. [Ed. note: our guest may or may not be one of these.] Those are the ones that try to improve the UBC community, beef up their resumes, and they all hang out together in one giant ball of awesome. They are the CUS, the conferences and the clubs. They are the ones that wear suits just because they can, apply to jobs they are not qualified for yet still manage to nail them, and spend more time on volunteer position projects than on class projects; they want to see a Sauder just as good as the Iveys and the Whartons of this world. And they are the ones that will most directly benefit from the better building. The rest? Well, they’ll get an amazing facility all right, but they’d still become the same bookkeepers they would have become had the building never been improved.

FACT #4—YOU DON’T MESS WITH EX-MCKINSEY CONSULTANTS: What has set this referendum apart is backing from alumni. This is both a good and bad thing. You get strong, mature and knowledgeable people putting themselves behind an initiative—but you also get extremely persuasive individuals affecting the results of this vote. And trust me, when an ex-Mckinsey, ex-CUS president and all-round rock star wants you to vote yes, you are going to vote yes, a) because you fear the guy and b) you retain a small hope that one day, he’ll get you a job. That has been my only point of worry during this whole campaign; people unable to voice their opinions because they are afraid that they’ll be ostracized later.

apparently this is how commerce kids apply for jobs

Your browser may not support display of this image. FACT #5—SPEAKING OF MCKINSEY, YOU DON’T MESS WITH A FRENCH MAN: Ladies and gentlemen, my new-found crush is none other than UBC’s VP Finance, Pierre Ouillet. [Ed note: ooooOOOOoooooOOOOooo] This man cut SEVEN LAYERS of middle management and somehow found thirty million dollars to balance UBC’s budget. This man is a hawk, and if Sauder does not manage to cough up enough money to cover their ass, they will have to answer to this guy. He’ll most likely bail out the faculty with newly allowed debt financing and force Sauder to cut programs. But what he’ll also do is cut from other faculties and essentially “slow down” the renovations line so that other buildings slated for renovation, like law and pharmacy, are postponed. Taking our previous analogy further, that’s like having to wait in line at the Pit only to realize that the extremely long wait was because the bouncers had to take care of a pesky customer that got in through the back door.

rawwwrrrr. or, uh, screeeeeech.

Your browser may not support display of this image. FACT #6—YOU’RE DAMNED IF YOU DO AND YOU’RE DAMNED IF YOU DON’T: To get a better school, you need more money, but to get more money, you need a better school. So now what? The way I see it, it’s not about bailing about some ambitious Dean, or punishing the “bad” faculty, or simply building a building. It’s about laying down the foundation (or rather the rest of the foundation) for a better school. Sure, mistakes were made: Dean Dan should have secured financing, the CUS should have taken a more neutral stance and demanded more from their faculty, and the government should have worked together with the University and students so that this would never have happened in the first place.

BAWWW SCHNOOKUMS

Your browser may not support display of this image.

In the end, it’s about value and where YOU see it. If you think that $500 a year for four, or five, or six years is worth it, will get you a better degree and ultimately a better job, then by all means vote yes. If you consider this a gross mismanaging of the referendum process (which it was, in a sense) and a sneaky way to increase tuition, then vote no.

But what you certainly must NOT do is not vote at all.

XOXO,

Little Spoon

Voter Funded Building?

Henry Angus must be rolling in his grave. If you aren’t in Commerce, you probably haven’t heard of this referendum/Sauder/Henry Angus/my building/millions of dollars thing that’s been happening. Yeah, we don’t really give a fuck either.

we couldn't ignore that Dean Dan looks a bit like Putin...plus we threw in a political/sexy/economics joke #FTW

Continue reading