Last March, students voted to add a new addition to the AMS executive team: VP student life (VPSL).
Kevin Heieis, the former special projects lead in the AMS Presidents’ Office, was appointed as interim VP student life in May and officially elected after winning an uncontested race in September. Heieis identified three core pillars to his campaign: creating a direct impact for students, supporting student groups and their leadership and advocating for UBC to rethink its approach to campus life and identity.
Over halfway through his term, Heieis’s work to improve student life has not gone unnoticed. AMS executives are tasked with creating goals that reflect their priorities and commitments to the UBC community and allow students to hold executives accountable on their promises. Out of his 14 identified action items, Heieis has reported full completion of seven, with five goals in progress and two that have yet to be addressed.
One of Heieis’s main challenges has been learning “what is actually feasible with this role.” He was hopeful for the return of an inclusive multi-day Interfaculty Cup in September 2025, but the event was revised to a three-hour interfaculty tug of war.
Heieis also committed to developing a multi-year student life plan, intended to outline target milestones for long-term VPSL initiatives. However, in September, he reported to AMS Council that the plan was “delayed to ensure comprehensive consultation” and in order to incorporate the results from the Student Engagement Survey (SES). Heieis made a point to update the SES with the intention of identifying specific challenges across campus.
The results of the SES have not yet been released, and the multi-year student life plan remains incomplete. Heieis said that the SES analysis “is still in progress, and it'll probably align with [an] end-of-year transition and future plans for long term vision of the role.”
When asked specifically about his goal to build a collaborative, semesterly calendar for campus-wide events, which has not been published, Heieis cited uncertainty around athletic tournament schedules as the main reason for this.
“A longer-term project that I'd like to see is a system where student groups can submit their own events,” he said, “but trying to centralize all of this is a larger challenge that will take time to implement.”
Campus spirit and colours
Heieis, an integrated engineering major, has learned more than linear circuits and thermodynamics from his faculty.
“I've taken a lot of lessons from the engineering culture on campus, where you see a red jacket and potentially some noisy people … you don't have to know someone to go up and interact with them.”
Heieis believes that the wider UBC community lacks this sense of belonging and wants to unite the campus utilizing the university’s previous official colours of blue and gold. In 2024, he wrote an opinion article for The Ubyssey, arguing that reawakening campus colours would create a stronger sense of campus identity. It was this lack of campus identity, cohesion and student-focused communication that motivated Heieis to push for the creation of the VP student life position in the first place.
Heieis’s executive goals include enhancing coordination for 2025 Welcome Back and Orientation events and the establishment of a 2026 Welcome Back group to specifically target first-year students. In his opinion article, Heieis wrote that first-years “will believe campus culture exists if UBC acts like it does, and by virtue, culture will form.”
As part of his efforts to reinvigorate campus culture, Heieis developed a brightly blue and gold joint Thunderbird and AMS baseball jersey in August last year. In a September AMS meeting, he told councillors that the reception had been positive.
Heieis has also been involved in numerous student organizations and events on campus, from the Ski and Board club, to the CiTR radio station, to a dance battle (which he lost). He said that these experiences taught him interpersonal skills that have become invaluable to his role.
“It's been rewarding [to have] focused a lot on building relationships and supporting student organizations and to hear from them how appreciative they are of it.”
Heieis has not only built relationships with student groups, but the university. Heieis said that since he assumed office, the relationship between the AMS and UBC has unexpectedly developed “in a way that we haven't seen before.” Heieis did not expand on the nature of this relationship.
Advancing mental health programming was one of Heieis’s key campaign promises. Last year, he organized the AMS’s Mental Health and Wellness Week in November, the first in-person iteration of Thrive Week since 2017, which saw collaborations between AMS Events and five undergraduate constituencies. As a part of the week’s programming, there were events such as a financial wellness workshop and marshmallow roasting outside of the AMS Nest.
“Improving campus spirit can improve general well-being on campus … [that] is one of the big things that this role can support with,” Heieis said.
Beyond Mental Health and Wellness Week, Heieis’s reported that he has consulted with stakeholders on ways to support overlooked student demographics — such as commuters and upper-years — with their mental well-being. However, there have not been any further AMS-run mental health events since November, and Heieis did not comment on any plans for mental health focused events during the remainder of his term.
While Heieis has made progress toward achieving the majority of his remaining goals, the reality of achieving all he has promised is slim.
When asked what traits future VP student life’s should have, Kevin said that empathy, open-mindedness and extroversion are key.
“I'd say that a person who would make the best VP student life is someone who will put aside biases, politics and any presumptions about others for the goal of getting to know and understand the people on this campus.”
