AMS Councillors met last night to conclude the academic year with a presentation from the Interfaculty First-Year Committee, overview upcoming changes to AMS Code and to hear executive remarks.
Here’s what you might’ve missed.
Interfaculty committee report
The session opened with a presentation from the UBC’s Interfaculty First-Year Committee which shared both the committee’s successes and recommendations for the future.
The group held their flagship Pit Night on April 3, and committee co-chair Sara Ye described the success of the event to the praise of AMS Council. According to Ye, around 450 tickets were sold and the event’s digital performance optics saw “a pretty exponential increase in terms of interactions and views.”
“With the right support, there really is a lot of interest for this first-year community,” said Ye.
On what to change moving forward, Ye recommended implementing official transition protocols to orient committee successors, elect committee leadership earlier on and expand awareness of the committee.
“[We] kind of created this committee from scratch,” said Ye. “And in the beginning …. no one really trusted that we were able to use the money properly.”
“[We’re] hoping that with the exposure from this event, along with future advocacy, we can maybe expand interfaculty reach and just increase that overall awareness.”
Code changes
AMS President Christian ‘CK’ Kyle presented an overview of a series of proposed changes to various sections of AMS Code.
According to Kyle, many of the changes are driven by the newly-passed creation of a VP student life, since how each executive operates needs to be reworked as some responsibilities get delegated to the new position.
Other sections of code, however, are being amended to clarify wording and structure in places, cut outdated Code and update “the duties of [each] executive to match what has actually been happening in the office.”
One such example of clarifying structure Kyle provided was in moving the information which states that “the financial controller shall instruct each executive member on [the] operation of the administration office” out of the executive section.
“This happens anyway, but it's not an executive duty, so it doesn't actually belong in the executive section. If it goes anywhere, it should be in the financial procedure section of Code,” said Kyle.
Executive remarks & committee reports
Council also heard a number of executive remarks ranging from VP External Solomon Yi-Kieran’s work concerning the upcoming federal election to discussion on the most recent meeting of UBC’s Board of Governors (BoG).
Yi-Kieran discussed his office’s marketing efforts for the election, describing poster campaigns alongside arranging four days of advanced voting in the Nest from April 13–16 to encourage student electoral participation.
Yi-Kieran also promoted a debate of the Vancouver-Quadra candidates which is happening this Friday, April 11 at the Michael Kingsmill Forum on the fourth floor of the AMS Nest.
“The goal is to get all four candidates running in this riding to answer student questions,” they said.
Council also heard end-of-term reports from various offices and committees, including information on AMS Block Party ticket sales, an update from VP Finance Gagan Parmar on his work preparing the AMS’s preliminary budget and an announcement from AMS Managing Director Justin Lieu that restaurant-outlet Nourish will be closing on April 25.
AMS Council also said goodbye to Eshana Bhangu and Kamil Kanji in their roles as student-governors for the BoG.
In her final update as a governor, Bhangu said herself and Kanji voiced “a lot of disappointment” with the Board’s “lack of progress on some very basic items” at the most recent March 28 meeting, specifically with regard to financial literacy tools for students.
UBC currently has a one-year cost calculator — according to Bhangu, the AMS has been advocating to turn this into a four-year cost calculator for years but have faced resistance from the UBC registrar’s office.
Kyle also claimed that at the March 28 meeting, the registrar incorrectly asserted the AMS was in agreement with cutting the cost calculator.
“We're not an agreement, that's been made explicit in about a dozen different meetings over the course of even just my term as president,” Kyle said. “So just in case any councillors were confused, because they did just kind of make it up, the AMS is in opposition to cutting transparency for students.”
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