The Insiders
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Mar
17
SUS election results!
Posted by: Neal Yonson | March 17, 2007 | 8 Comments
These are unofficial until next Thursday, but I thought I’d post them anyhow. Note the high voter turnout via WebCT!
President
Michael Duncan – Yes 1079, No 206
Vice President External
Jamil Rhajiak – Yes 989, No 227
Vice President Internal
Jimmy Yan – 474
Stephen Yoon – 321
Gregory Stegeman – 211
Farzin Barekat – 157
Director of Administration
Alex Lougheed – 608
Maria Jogova – 572
Director of Finance
Lois Chan – 583
Aaron Sihota – 404
Vishal Hirilal – 194
Director of Publications
Ally Vaz – 676
Varun Ramraj – 439
Public Relations Officer
Meghan Ho – 440
Lawrence Chow – 402
Mark Berg – 326
Director of Sports
Polly Kwok – Yes 885, No 296
Science Senator
Diana Diao – 605
Geoff Costeloe – 409
Martin Sing – 196
Alma Mater Society Council Representatives
Lougheed – 517
Tahara Bhate – 454
Tristan Markle – 420
Clark Funnell – 396
Maria Jogova – 389
Stephen Yoon – 346
Anita Yuk – 322
Maayan Kreitzman – 290
Thoughts behind the jump.
My impressions are as follows – I’m not at all surprised Mike Duncan won by a landslide yes vote, nor by the wins of Alex Lougheed, Lois Chan, Meghan Ho, and Diana Diao.
I do hope Alex Lougheed will lose some of his arrogance and actually try to work with people in order to push anything forward. I also hope Lois Chan’s platform of rage will transform, again, into something productive and progressive. Since she controls the budget, it places her in a powerful role in thinking twice about blindly allocating money (and thus execution) towards self-serving events. Make no mistake – electing those two was a clear message that SUS will have to slap itself in the face several times: we, the members of SUS, want to see change.
Diana will have to learn how to speak out and work beyond the prescribed codified duties if she wants to get anything done at Senate – something she has yet to demonstrate (despite of her boyfriend’s objections to this on WebCT). Organizing an open house at SUS in no way translates to an ability to speak up on the floor of senate or advocating for student agendas through administrative hurdles.
The surprises are Tahara’s win to AMS Council and Ally Vaz (well not so much, I’m sure her sorority helped her out tons).
I’m sad that Maayan didn’t make the elections cut, because I can see her be a very diligent and thoughtful AMS councillor. This once again shows that popularity is still an emanating force in the democratic process – informed voting would have no doubt placed her higher.
Most importantly, I’m really happy about the Voter turnout. In the past voter turnout was around 10% (ish). WebCT proved to be a tool of convenience and accessibility and I suppose this helped the strong(er) numbers shown above.
Congratulations to the winners – you have a heavy task ahead of you.
Comments
8 Comments so far
platform of rage!
hahah…
what do you think about sci-team and how sci-team and SUS overlap in some areas and how they should work together?
That is an important question.
I think Sci Team is a lot more relevant to Science students at the moment. In fact I would argue that Janet Beddoes (sp?) would not have started Sci Team if SUS had been doing its job.
So, in terms of that I think Sci Team could brainstorm how it could see SUS supportings its roles and vice versa.
It would be really great if other SUS-execs would join in on the discussion. Let me invite them.
Thanks for asking this important question.
Gina
Janet Sinclair, actually, is her name now.
The fact that you were suprised to see some people win who you thought were not the most deserving (when in fact they are very deserving and have proven themselves very competent this year), and the fact that you were not suprised to see certain people lose (when in fact they have also proven themselves very deserving and competent) shows that you clearly don’t know everyone, or even the big names in SUS. If you want to comment on the candidates, you should really get to know them all better.
I know I’m not an exec, but here are my two cents on the matter:
In terms of the SCI Team- the SUS Academic Committee did work with them a bit this year, and I think that this partnership would greatly benefit science students. I feel like SUS doesn’t always address the issues that science students feel are important, and that working in conjunction with the SCI team would really benefit science students in general.
Hi Gina (and everyone else!) –
Working with the Sci Team (and more specifically, Science Advising) is something I’ve been trying to do all year with varying degrees of success. The Acadmic Committee met with Janet and some Sci Team members in the fall to brainstorm areas where we could work together (or separately, since our mandates overlap) but unfortunately not much came of it.
Then early this term we met with Paul Harrison and Nanci Martin (head of Advising) to discuss some of the initiatives we wanted to focus on. One of the big concerns was that there was little peer support for 2nd year students so we collaborated to develop the first ever “Beyond 2nd Year” for Science students. The format of the event was a short presentation from Paul and Advising about issues 2nd years face (like switching programs, failing required courses, etc) followed by informal student networking where 2nd years could talk to 3rd/4th/5th year students in the programs they were interested in to see what they’re actually like. This is the first time I can think of that SUS and Science Advising have worked together on an event, and I think it was very successful for its first year.
Anyways – that’s a quick summary of where we’ve been working together this year. It seems to have become that the Sci Team focuses more on personal skills development and those kind of events (with a Science Advising spin) while the SUS Academic Committee is more focused on lobbying the Faculty or Departments about specific student concerns (like teaching evaluations for example – we helped put together a trial mid-term evaluation in some Physics courses to see if prof/students would go for it… hopefully we can roll it out faculty-wide next academic year)
Reka
Sci Team will be addressed the first meeting of the new executive committee.
As Executive Secretary, all I can really do is give them priority bookings in the Ladha Centre, which, if we count them as the faculty of Science, they already have. The rest falls on the Academic Committee, chaired by incoming VP Internal Jimmy Yan.